What is Social Media Marketing (SMM)? How to Use it for your Business?

What is Social Media Marketing (SMM)?

"What is Social Media Marketing": So what exactly is social media marketing? It is the process of gaining traffic or attention through social media sites. Social media is definitely the fastest-growing trend in the history of the world. Be it YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram… people are spending a lot of time on these platforms. The best part is that this sector has grown faster than the internet itself. Thus, the exponential rise of social media, what is social media marketing.

And with so many people, millions and billions of people spending so much of their time on social media channels social media marketing becomes a very important way to drive customers to your business.

Now there are so many new marketing channels coming up, Facebook marketing, Twitter marketing, LinkedIn marketing, and YouTube marketing and all of them are giving amazing airways. We’ll be going through today’s popular social media channels, how to market to them, what kind of audience you should market to, and what should be your strategy for your social media marketing.

And with so many people, millions and billions of people spending so much of their time on social media channels social media marketing becomes a very important way to drive customers to your business.

Now there are so many new marketing channels coming up, Facebook marketing, Twitter marketing, LinkedIn marketing, and YouTube marketing, and all of them are giving amazing airways. We’ll be going through today’s popular social media channels, how to market to them, what kind of audience you should market to, and what should be your strategy for your social media marketing.

Why is social media marketing important?

There are many reasons why you should incorporate social media marketing in your business.

• Reaching targeted, niche-oriented audiences. You’ll be surprised what kind of targeting you can achieve in this social media channels.
• Increase engagement and response. And it is the perfect channel to create trust, credibility, and a relationship with your audience. Now in today’s work ways, there’s so many competitions, the only way to distinguish yourself is to connect to the emotion of the customers or the prospective customers or your audience.
• Building Trust, Credibility, and relationship with your audience and other brands. And definitely, a very important trait is viral sharing.
• Viral Sharing Allowing others to share your Content. If you post a viral, then you can easily drive up- the best kind of marketing is when people start referring their services or products to their friends. And this is where viral sharing comes into play, people will share your content and you’ll reach a much newer audience which you couldn’t have reached.
• Increasing Website Traffic. Social media is also a very important channel to increase website traffic, and building conversions, now we will be talking more about conversions about what they are, how to setup our Facebook Ad section.
• Building Conversions. Even if a brand is nameless, let’s say you are a startup, if you’re opening a new website or a new business.
• Raising brand awareness. So social media is an amazing platform to create a brand on the internet, to introduce your services or product to the market for the first time. And see even the response rate. There are so many benefits to social media marketing.

What is Social Media Marketing (SMM)?

"What is Social Media Marketing": So what exactly is social media marketing? It is the process of gaining traffic or attention through social media sites. Social media is definitely the fastest-growing trend in the history of the world. Be it YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram… people are spending a lot of time on these platforms. The best part is that this sector has grown faster than the internet itself. Thus, the exponential rise of social media, what is social media marketing.

And with so many people, millions and billions of people spending so much of their time on social media channels social media marketing becomes a very important way to drive customers to your business.

Now there are so many new marketing channels coming up, Facebook marketing, Twitter marketing, LinkedIn marketing, and YouTube marketing and all of them are giving amazing airways. We’ll be going through today’s popular social media channels, how to market to them, what kind of audience you should market to, and what should be your strategy for your social media marketing.

And with so many people, millions and billions of people spending so much of their time on social media channels social media marketing becomes a very important way to drive customers to your business.

Now there are so many new marketing channels coming up, Facebook marketing, Twitter marketing, LinkedIn marketing, and YouTube marketing, and all of them are giving amazing airways. We’ll be going through today’s popular social media channels, how to market to them, what kind of audience you should market to, and what should be your strategy for your social media marketing.

Why is social media marketing important?

There are many reasons why you should incorporate social media marketing in your business.

• Reaching targeted, niche-oriented audiences. You’ll be surprised what kind of targeting you can achieve in these social media channels.
• Increase engagement and response. And it is the perfect channel to create trust, credibility, and a relationship with your audience. Now in today’s work ways, there are so much competition, the only way to distinguish yourself is to connect to the emotion of the customers or the prospective customers, or your audience.
• Building Trust, Credibility, and relationship with your audience and other brands. And definitely, a very important trait is viral sharing.
• Viral Sharing Allowing others to share your Content. If you post a viral, then you can easily drive up the best kind of marketing is when people start referring their services or products to their friends. And this is where viral sharing comes into play, people will share your content and you’ll reach a much newer audience than you couldn’t have reached.
• Increasing Website Traffic. Social media is also a very important channel to increase website traffic, and build conversions, now we will be talking more about conversions what they are, and how to set up our Facebook Ad section.
• Building Conversions. Even if a brand is nameless, let’s say you are a startup, if you’re opening a new website or a new business.
• Raising brand awareness. So social media is an amazing platform to create a brand on the internet, to introduce your services or product to the market for the first time. And see even the response rate. There are so many benefits to social media marketing.

Usage of Social Media Marketing  

Now definitely the usage of social media has increased a lot, you can see by the graph  itself, like how many people are consuming social media channels.  Around 60% people are opening whats-app more than once a day, you can see the similar trend on Facebook and YouTube as well.So these graphs are really giving really important insights that the use of social media is solucrius. So you don’t just start social media marketing by choosing a platform and start paying for ads. It doesn’t work like that.

Social Media Marketing Start With a Plan

Business Goals: You need to first understand your business goals. If you’re a B to B company, that means business to business company, to B to C company, business to customer company… you need to first align your goals, to the kind of strategy you are looking for. If you’ll just start a social media campaign without a social strategy, then in the end you’ll just end up losing money. So this is where the first step of creating a customer avatar is extremely important. You need to know exactly where your customer is, what kind of customer is the perfect customer for you.

Ask Some Questions yourself. Also there are some common questions that you should ask yourself in defining your social media marketing.

• What are you hoping to achieve through social media marketing? Like what are you hoping to achieve in your social media marketing.Is it brand awareness, is it conversions?The
• Who are your target audience? If you’ve never defined your audience clearly, you will never be able to make a profitable social media campaign. The better you know your audience, the better results you’ll get from your social media marketing.
• Where would your target audience hang out and how would they use social media? So you should know exactly where your audience is hanging out. Like are they on Instagram, are they on Facebook? If they are on Facebook, what kind of interests do they like? Which groups do they follow? Are they males, or are they females? What is the age bracket? Are 18-25, 25-30?Are the homemakers? Are they doing jobs or are they more into the business? So you should know a lot about your customer. And also your goal should also be aligned with your social media marketing
• What message do you want to send to your audience with social media marketing? So these are the multiple questions you usually ask yourself before creating a social media marketing campaign for yourself.

Social Media Marketing - Content & Shares

Shares are the currency of the social media world, shares are all that matters on social media. So your content must be engaging enough that people would want to share it.That will create the ripple effect, that will create the viral effect. So as you can see in the graph here, this list downs the various contents people share the most. And you can see that info-graphic is something that people tend to share more compared to the other kind of content. But yes listical, like top ten list articles have always been in various viral websites like ScoopWhoop.com or Buzzfeed.com. Video is something that’s getting popular in 2019, and I’m sure in the coming years as well, video will be highly popular.

Social Media Trends

You should also know about the social media trend. The first is definitely the organic reach is going down. Now social media platforms want to make money. Like Facebook, the only way the make money is through advertisements. So they are making it increasingly difficult for businesses to create their audiences organically.

So they want businesses to pay money to reach to their audience. Even earlier on Facebook page- let’s say you have 10,000 people who like page, if you used to post you will be able to reach a big amount of audience.

But nowadays if you post and you are not boosting your post, you won’t be able to reach a big number of- even if a lot of people are actually following you. So social is moving more towards “pay to play”.

The more money you’ll be paying, the bigger the reach of your campaign. Social media algorithms will always prioritize advertisements. So the more businesses are willing to pay the better reach you will get.

Best Network for Social Media Marketing?

So now many people ask me about which is the best network for their social media marketing,many of you must already know that there is

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• Snapchat
• LinkedIn and there are so many others like Reddit, even Quora is getting popular thesedays.

But the answer to this question of which is the best network, there is no correct answer. It all depends upon your strategy. There is no such thing as a best network. At the same time you should know what your goals are, from this social marketing campaign.

•  Facebook

Launched in 2004,  and approximately 2 billion people are actively using Facebook… I can give you so many different stats but Facebook is the big daddy of social media marketing. In my experience, especially for marketers- digital marketers- Facebook is like the best platform to market on.

It has the most targeted ads. And if you’ll be looking at a Facebook ads video, you will understand the kind of targeting options that Facebook give.

You’ll be surprised by the ways you can actually market your products. You’ll start to see the kind of power a digital marketer has in influencing a person into making a purchase. That’s the kind of power, Facebook advertisement has.

You can be asked specifically defining your customers down to the socks that he’s wearing.Yes, that is the power of Facebook ads. I’ll be covering Facebook ads more in detail in our Facebook ads video.

Images will get much higher click rate compared to written content so, whenever you are targeting Facebook as a social media channel, you use more visual contents like images, videos,etc.And also you can use a user-generated content, like give the readers a chance to share something about themselves by offering them a conversation starter. 

And also you have to have some personal touch when you’re going on Facebook ads as a social media marketing channel, it is- respond to people’s post, comment them, help them out.You can also create a more personal touch by sharing things about yourself but also you have to keep- maintain an extent to which that you can share.

And in the end it’s all about trial and error, try different things and see which ones are working for your audience.So should you be on Facebook for your marketing channel?If you’re thinking of creating more leads, in my experience I’ve seen that Facebook can be used by all the businesses out there.

Because there’s some kind of advertisement, some kind of branding or conversion funnel were you can start.Just the amount of targeting that Facebook provides it becomes a paradise for a marketer.

You can increase the website traffic, you can increase the brand loyalty, you can unread targeting ads, you can do so many things in Facebook.So if you haven’t started using Facebook, make sure you start.

• Twitter

Now let’s talk about Twitter.Twitter also has 3 billion plus user accounts. And 330 million active users and all the other stats like 80% of Twitter users have mentioned brand in a tweet.So specially for brands Twitter is an amazing platform. 

Just like I told you that whenever we talk about Twitter it’s more related to brand awareness, so if you’re a starter if you are just starting out, then you can consider Twitter as a marketing channel. And also specifically in the online reputation management, Twitter is an extremely effective channel. 

To connect to the customer query, to take their feedback, respond to their feedback and also handle their queries, so I think Twitter can be an extremely amazing channel for online reputation management. 

You can also try various other strategies like running a conversion campaign or driving traffic to your website.But compared to Facebook, that won’t give a much better arrow around Twitter. 

So if you’re just starting out in social media marketing, then I would recommend you to start with Facebook and then move on to Twitter.

• Instagram

Now Instagram is supposedly the new Facebook, these days people are moving away from Facebook and going more on the Instagram.

Because of the more visual content and also the video content is really dominating on Instagram.He growth of Instagram has been exponential, after Facebook acquired Instagram it has really exploded. 

And it has already killed Snapchat. Snapchat used to be its competitor, but now almost all of their features are available on Instagram.

Then again almost 40 billion photos are shared to date and 4.2 billion people are liking the posts.500 million plus Instagram accounts are active every day.So the data is amazing.

• Why we choose Instagram for Social Media Marketing?

And the best part about Instagram is the visual content.And people respond much better to visual content compared to a textual content.Just like Facebook you can use it for everything. Be it targeting ads, be it generating sales, be it brand awareness and especially the influence of marketing. 

The influence of marketing has exploded in 2018 and I am sure that by 2020 as well, influencer marketing will keep on dominating the social media channels. Especially Instagram, so whenever you are learning Facebook Ads, you can select the placement on Instagram as well.So the same ad will be shown on both Facebook and Instagram. 

I’ll be showing you this in our Facebook Ads lesson. So you should definitely consider Instagram in my opinion.It’s an amazing channel to get conversions, for brand awareness, for any kind of advertisement.

• YouTube

One trend that has been dominating the marketing world is the video.Even on Facebook, videos have been given higher preference compared to images or text and also just like the impact of videos is much higher than an image. 

And also after this huge video reliance with people having access to high speed internet,YouTube has started to dominate the Indian market.

• Why You Should Be On YouTube?

First of all it captures attention, because video has always been more powerful compared to any other channel of marketing. And it is high traffic volume, YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google, it has massive traffic. 

There are multiple ways to advertise, you can go for the advertisement you can also do an influence marketing, but collaborating with the influences who have the kind of audience that you are looking for. 

And the best part about YouTube is that the video creates much more influence compared to images or text, personally for me, I’ll be focusing a lot on YouTube this year.I’ll be running advertisements and we’ll be trying various strategies to see which one is working for me. 

So I would recommend for you guys as well to use YouTube as well, in your advertising campaign.

• LinkedIn

Now let’s talk about LinkedIn. LinkedIn is very popular especially in the professional world space.And total amount of LinkedIn users are 500 million so it’s not a small number.People think it’s not that popular, but yes, LinkedIn is an extremely popular website.One very popular question is

• Is LinkedIn worth trying?

Honestly in my experience and working with clients as well, I’ve seen that LinkedIn gives much better results if you’re going with B2B, when your target customers are more businesses and not B2C. 

LinkedIn also gives you a lot of precise targeting options so you can target your prospect customers in various ways. You can also use LinkedIn groups to establish your business as an expert on certain topics. If you’re just starting out with social media marketing, then I won’t recommend you to go directly into LinekdIn. 

I’ll still recommend you to first try, at least the Facebook and Instagram, and once you’re familiar with all those platforms then you can move on to LinkedIn and try this one.

• LinkedIn Ads

But if you’re a B2B company you can directly go into the LinkedIn Ads. And I think they’ll be the best kind of advertisement for your business. There was also a survey done on the effectiveness rating for the B2B social media platforms. 

And LinkedIn came up with the top.So especially with the B2B businesses, LinkedIn is the perfect opportunity and the perfect social network to drive their customers.

• Snapchat

It gained a lot of popularity, but recently it has been going on a declining trend because Instagram is dominating the market. And almost all the features of Snapchat is also available on Instagram. Not all of them, but still Instagram has taken a big chunk of the Snapchat audience.

Going with the numbers, approximately 300 million monthly active users. More than 10 billion daily Snapchat video views. And active Snapchat users open the app 18 plus times every day. So the numbers are really good and speak for themselves.

• Should you be doing Snapchat

Well if you’re target audience is young, if you are going for a very young audience may be 15 – 18 or 15 – 22. If you’re targeting millennial, then Snap-chat is the perfect network for you. If you are owning an e-commerce store or targeting female specifically, because Snap-chat is more dominated by females, young females. 

I know about an e-commerce store that made a killing on Snapchat. They were targeting some kind of makeup product and they were heavily advertising on Snapchat. I think they are making millions of dollars per month just through Snapchat ads alone. So if you’re targeting menials, if you’re targeting young people, Snapchat should bein your priority list.

• B2B On Snapchat

When we talk about B2B, I won’t recommend you to go for B2B on Snapchat. One another area where you can use Snapchat is the brand awareness. Because again it’s a visual content, the “stories” are videos in nature.

So it will create a much more powerful impact. If I would have to give you an order of how to start your social media marketing, then I would recommend you to go for Facebook along with Instagram. And then slowly move on to YouTube as well, and then you can try the other networks like LinkedIn, Twitter and Snapchat.

And see what kinds of results you’re getting. And then start pushing more budget to the ads that are giving you the best returns.

Here are the social media metrics that you must measure.

• Anticipate growth by counting your followers, so the first thing I would recommend you to is to count the likes in your content creation. So let’s say you have created 10 different kind of content phases. So make sure you check which content is getting the best kind of engagement.
• Which content is liked by your audience so that you can create more of such content in the future.
• Also keep on the user comments because these will give you a very good idea about what people are looking for. How are they interacting with your content. Or may be some, new content ideas as well.
• Content share is another very important metric because you need to know how many people are actually sharing your content to their friends.
• So these are the few metrics that you can keep a track on whenever you’re doing you're social media marketing.

Tool That You Must Use

So now I’ve listed various of the tools that you can use to create an effective social media marketing campaign.

• Buffer
• BuzzSumo
• Canva
• Sprout Social
• Hootsuite
• Feedly
• Audiense
• Tweepi
• Crowdfire
• Buffer, Buffer is used for social media scheduling. So instead of posting on individual networks, you can directly integrate all the social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram all of them on Buffer. I just post once, and the post will be posted down to all various networks.
• BuzzSumo is one that we’ll be using for finding good content ideas.It is another important and amazing tool.
• Canva can be used for creating beautiful graphics data for free.

So make sure you check all these tools out and see which one suits you the best.The first three I personally use so that is why I’ve added “recommended” on to them.

Conclusion: 

So guys this was a short Blog on what is social media marketing. Personally for me, whenever I talk about social media, I primarily focus on Facebook Ads along with Instagram. And we will be covering that in detail in the future lesson. 

So make sure you read this Blog because that’ll be highly comprehensive. And I’ll be going through a lot on how to make effective a Facebook Ad. Hey guys, I hope you like this overview of social media marketing. In the next lesson we’ll be covering Instagram marketing. How you can start and skill an Instagram account in very few days.