Social media is taking control all over the world. In the last two decades, we witnessed a rapid growth of social media and digitalization.
What is SMM?
Social media marketing (SMM) involves online social networks to market and sell your products and services.
Social media marketing is a very successful practice nowadays. Millions and trillions of people are social media users, and the number is increasing day by day.
Importance of SMM:
SMM is of great importance, as it helps you engage with your customers quickly and easily. It allows you to make others aware of your brand or company. It gives you the opportunity of direct contact between company and customer.
here you can get further information on How to conduct a social media marketing campaign
Introduction to major SMM platforms:
Today, we see an expanded form of social media since it is not limited to three or four sites, making it a vast domain for business benefits.
Here are some primarily used social media platforms:
- Snapchat
- YouTube
There are many other sites, but we have shared the mainly used mediums. So if you’re a beginner to social media marketing, you need to go step by step with the following strategies.
- Educate people with your content
- Personalize your marketing messages
- Use data to drive your creativity
- Invest in original research
- Update & optimize your content
- Expand guest blogging opportunities
- Use more visuals and videos
- Start using marketing automation
- Jazz up your profiles with a diverse content strategy
- Use brand advocates to create a community for your audience
Elements of Robust Social Media Strategy
- Community Growth
- Engagement
- Website Clicks
- Retargeting
You need to select the right platform for your branding and marketing needs when doing this.
Here we will have an in-depth look at how different social networking sites help you grow your business.
Role of Facebook in SMM:
Facebook is a highly used app and is also recognized worldwide. According to a Facebook report, there are about two billion-plus users active on Facebook monthly.
It allows you to share videos, pictures, and every kind of data. Recently, it is the largest social media app. So we can believe without any doubt that Facebook is a very effective medium.
Facebook ads are an easy opportunity for social marketing purposes but need an extensive understanding of paid campaigns and sound expertise in planning, executing, and optimizing Facebook campaigns.
Starting an online shop on Facebook is also a good choice.
You can simply create your shop page. Here, you can quickly enter the pictures and videos of your products and services. Then, when you click on the Facebook shop, a list of products emerges.
You can read the description of each item and can buy it directly from here.
The main points that you’ve to keep in mind while using Facebook for marketing purposes:
- Understand Facebook algorithms
- Never try to make fake followers
- Know the ingredients of a good Facebook shop
- Deliver targeted brand messages through videos
- Make the most of Facebook groups
- Influencer marketing by Facebook
- Use carousel ad format as a storytelling canvas
So, we can say that using Facebook for marketing is a great deal.
Now have a look at how Instagram works.
Role of Instagram in SMM:
Instagram is rapidly increasing its followers day by day. Therefore, a good profile with valuable and engaging content can bring you thousands of followers very soon.
It is a more suitable choice for bloggers, entrepreneurs, and beginners.
According to Statista, “55% of Instagram users are under 25.”
They check their Instagram again and again in a day.
Instagram allows you to add the “business” option to your profile.
It will decorate your profile according to a good business profile. You can see your business insights and analytics that will help you optimize your marketing strategy.
Compared to Facebook, Instagram is the most appropriate solution for product-based businesses.
It gives sponsored posts based on people’s interests. For example, if a person likes looking for clothes or has followed clothing brands. Instagram will suggest more pages like this. In addition, you can directly add your Facebook story to Instagram and vice versa. It presents the bottom line of the shop now option. By clicking on it, you directly reach that profile.
You can place your order from there.
Instagram shopping brings you a set of features to help you sell and share your brand story. It’s your storefront where people can easily shop your products.
You can create a shop feature on your profile which helps to bring you directly to the shopping page.
It also provides story ads. It is a good way of catching the attention of the user.
If a user is simply going through IG stories, it will show sponsored stories too. When you watch the stories of pages you’ve followed, you can also see some suggested stories. These suggestions are based on your interest and more liked posts.
Now I’ll tell you how to increase your IG followers.
Increasing the number of followers on Instagram is essential for businesses, and here is how you can do this:
- Use relevant tags on your posts
- Stay connected to the customers
- Provide customer-friendly service
- DM your profile to others
- Providing unique ideas
- Be responsive (in DMs and comment section)
- Post daily with suitable frequency
- Put stories; make the best use of IGTV
- Ask them to give reviews
- Keep optimizing your page
- Perform competitor analysis
Instagram is the best platform for beginners to expand their business quickly.
Role of YouTube:
According to Alexa, “YouTube is the second most visited website after Google,” and Google says, “8 out of 10 people (18-49 years old) watch YouTube in an average month.” – making YouTube a unique video marketing platform.
YouTube marketing is tricky, but it is also an excellent idea to promote your brand.
Ways to successful marketing on YouTube:
- Create a unique channel identity
- Create innovative videos with enticing content
- Don’t be a copycat; come up with fantastic creativity
- Add good music in the background
- Use catchy filters for visuals but avoid overdoing
- Use a good quality camera to produce HD videos
- Upload videos frequently to enhance audience engagement
After having reasonable subscribers and viewers, you can also run paid video marketing on YouTube.
These platforms, including Twitter and Quora, can be a turning point for your brand promotion and building valuable customer relationships.
B2C vs. B2B SMM Marketing
B2C stands for business-to-consumer, in which a B2C company sells its products directly to the consumer individually. For example, Amazon, Walmart, etc.
Instagram & Facebook are suitable social media apps for it.
On the other hand, B2B is termed as business-to-business in which a company offers its products and services to another company’s business.
For example, automobile manufacturing, IT outsourcing company
LinkedIn is a suitable SM app for B2B.
How to conduct SMM campaigns?
There are two primary social media marketing campaigns.
- Organic Campaigns
- Paid Campaigns
Let’s have a look at how they differ.
Organic campaigns are non-paid brand promotions in which social media activities are performed without paid advertising.
It enhances your business over time. It doesn’t use sponsored or advertised posts.
Conducting organic social media campaigns:
- Choose the right platform w.r.t your brand
- Extensive market research and competitors’ analysis
- Build buyers persona with accurate audience info
- Optimize your social profiles for better visibility
- Create evergreen and shareable content
- Categorize your posts to target a specific audience
- Keywords-rich post descriptions (that sound natural)
- Keep posts frequency reasonable; don’t be afraid of experimenting
- Post the right type and balance of promotional content
- Preferably post your content during non-peak/slow hours
- Aggressively promote your social profiles everywhere
- Promote positive user experience through proper audience engagement
In a nutshell, it is all about social profiles optimization, high-quality content, and a positive user experience.
Paid campaigns require sponsored ads to function.
Set your budget accordingly and select a suitable format, to begin with, this form of social media marketing.
Conducting paid social media campaigns:
- Set your objectives (awareness, consideration, conversion, nurturing)
- Know your target audience and their preferences – in detail
- Choose the right social media network for paid advertisements
- Decide who you are targeting and build a good buyer persona
- Put your retargeting infrastructure and tracking tools in place.
- Choose the best suitable social media ad formats (carousel, videos, etc.)
- Create compelling campaign content for the selected format
- Set your ad budget after researching the average advertising cost
Be strategic about your campaigns, perform social media audits and keep optimizing your ads to get better results.
Let’s Start Social Media Marketing!
Today, social media provides you with the best medium to get potential customers, sales and profits. It has a lot of perks.
If you’re a beginner, use this guide!
If you get these points, you can easily adjust your marketing network over there.