Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service. Although the terms e-marketing and digital marketing are still dominant in academia, social media marketing is becoming more popular for both practitioners and researchers.Most social media platforms have built-in data analystics tools, enabling companies to track the progress, success, and engagement of ad campaigns.
Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with your audience to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. This involves publishing great content on your social media profiles, listening to and engaging your followers, analyzing your results, and running social media advertisements.
The major social media platforms (at the moment) are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat.
The Five Core Pillars of Social Media Marketing
Strategy
Planning and Publishing
Listening and Engagement
Analytics
Advertising
Social media marketing first started with publishing. Businesses were sharing their content on social media to generate traffic to their websites and, hopefully, sales. But social media has matured far beyond being just a place to broadcast content.
Nowadays, businesses use social media in a myriad of different ways. For example, a business that is concerned about what people are saying about its brand would monitor social media conversations and response to relevant mentions (social media listening and engagement). A business that wants to understand how it’s performing on social media would analyze its reach, engagement, and sales on social media with an analytics tool (social media analytics). A business that wants to reach a specific set of audience at scale would run highly-targeted social media ads (social media advertising).
Why is social media marketing so important?
Social media marketing helps to validate your brand. A company’s social media presence, when done correctly, tells consumers that their brand is active and focused on thriving communication with consumers. … Social media marketing has the power to increase customer loyalty.
Let’s go back to the drawing board. What is marketing? As highlighted by the AMA, Marketing is the activity and process for creating; communicating and delivering offerings that have value to customers.
Now look at social media marketing. Social Media Today argue that the purpose of social media marketing is to build a brand and increase a brand’s visibility, through building relationships and communicating with potential customers.
The two seem to go hand-in-hand. But you may still be wondering, why social media?
‘‘Social networks are one of the fastest growing industries in the world’’.
This statement does seem to be thrown around quite frequently with anything internet marketing related these days. However with a projected 25.0% annual growth over the next 5 years, it is definitely be time to start investing in social media if you haven’t already. This is so important we’ve added a fancy tweet-this box below…. partly to show off, partly to make it easy for you to share it!