[ Table of Contents ]
1.What is Social Media Marketing?
2. Characteristics of Various Social Media Platforms
3. Benefits of Social Media Marketing
4. How to Establish a Basic Strategy
5. Metrics for Measuring Social Media Marketing
According to a study, as of October 2021, 4.55 billion people use social media. That’s over 53% of the global population using social media, making an effective social media strategy crucial for businesses to reach their target audience. Let’s dive into everything from what social media marketing is, to marketing strategies and metrics.
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1. What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing, often referred to as SNS marketing, involves creating content for social media platforms to promote products and services, build a community with your target audience, and drive business traffic.
As new features and various platforms emerge, social media marketing is constantly evolving. It takes place where your target customers are, facilitating communication between brands and customers or between customers themselves. Therefore, selecting platforms primarily used by your target customers and establishing strategies suited to each platform’s nature is essential to reach out effectively.
2. Characteristics of Various Social Media Platforms
Before diving deeper into social media marketing, let’s look at the types of SNS platforms and their characteristics.
- Users: 1.9 billion daily active users worldwide
- Main users: A balanced mix of Gen X and Millennials
- Suitable industries: B2C
- Business objectives: Brand awareness, advertising
Facebook is the largest and most well-known social media platform, providing various opportunities and sophisticated advertising tools for B2C businesses since its launch in 2004.
TikTok
- Users: 1 billion monthly active users worldwide
- Main users: Predominantly Gen Z followed by Millennials
- Suitable industries: B2B and B2C
- Business objectives: Short-form video content creation, user-generated content, brand awareness
TikTok, known for its short-form videos, exploded in popularity in 2020 and continues to be a leading platform for community building, following YouTube.
- Users: 1 billion monthly active users
- Main users: Primarily Millennials
- Suitable industries: B2C
- Business objectives: High-quality image and video production, user-generated content, advertising
Instagram has quickly made a global impact as the go-to platform for sharing visual content, distinguished by its specialized e-commerce tools allowing users to search, discover, and purchase products and services within the app.
- Users: 211 million daily active users worldwide
- Main users: Primarily Millennials
- Suitable industries: B2B and B2C
- Business objectives: Promotion, customer service, community building
While Instagram focuses on visuals, Twitter emphasizes text, offering a platform where followers can share engaging content through tweets, Twitter Spaces, Twitter Communities, and Twitter Moments.
- Users: 774 million active users worldwide
- Main users: Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials
- Suitable industries: B2B
- Business objectives: B2B relationships, business development, social selling
LinkedIn, often described as the career version of Facebook, is an ideal platform for B2B companies looking to uncover key decision-makers or build industry-specific communities.
YouTube
- Users: Over 315 million daily active users worldwide
- Main users: Primarily Millennials (wide user base across gender and age demographics)
- Suitable industries: B2C and B2B
- Business objectives: Brand awareness, long-form entertainment and how-to videos
YouTube, the world’s second-most visited website according to a statistic, is renowned as an excellent platform for building communities and sharing educational content due to its long-form content nature.
In addition to these, there are various other platforms like Pinterest, Clubhouse, etc. For businesses to achieve their objectives, selecting and utilizing the right platform based on the target audience’s preferences is crucial.
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3. The Perks of Social Media Marketing
There are tons of reasons why your business should be on social media, but here are some of the top benefits:
Boosting Brand Awareness
Not being on social media means your business is missing out on the potential to reach thousands, even millions, of customers. It’s already proven that engaging users on social media can boost your brand’s visibility. Plus, as users comment, like, share, repost, and save your content, you also get to enjoy some free promotion. Social media can also drive traffic directly to your site, helping raise brand awareness.
Lead Generation and Conversion Improvement
Promoting and sharing your products on social media exposes your business to customers who choose to follow you and engage with your brand. So, social media is a straightforward way to improve lead generation, increase conversions, and boost sales.
- Plan events that allow visitors and followers to participate.
- Include a link in your profile’s bio section to your website and where leads can be collected.
- Start live videos to announce products, update on exciting company news, or offer useful details.
- Implement a social media marketing campaign on one of your channels.
- Activate shopping features offered by each platform to sell products through your social profiles.
Strengthening Customer Relationships
Using social media lets customers connect with your business by following and engaging with your activities, building a continuous relationship. You can reach out to customers by answering their questions, offering help, asking followers about issues they face with your products or services, or offering prizes, building trust, and showing how much you value their opinions.
Gaining Insights from Competitors
Social media is a great way to see what your competitors are up to with their social media marketing tactics, the products they promote, the campaigns they run, or how they interact with their brand fans. It allows you to see what works and what doesn’t from those who already have the experience, helping you decide what aspects of your approach need changing or keeping. Finally, reviewing your competitors’ social accounts can help gauge how appealing and unique your marketing is.
4. How to Set Up a Basic Strategy
Though social media is ever-evolving, the steps to create a social media marketing strategy generally follow the same stages as creating any marketing strategy and narrowing it down to specific channels.
1) Buyer Persona and Target Analysis
The first step in creating a social media marketing strategy is to determine who your buyer personas and audience are, targeting their needs and interests appropriately. Think about why you’ve chosen your target audience and how to categorize them into detailed groups. Consider what content will attract which types of followers and customers, and plan engaging content that maintains their continuous interest.
2) Deciding on the Right Platform
Social media marketers need to decide which platforms to share their content on. There’s no right or wrong answer when choosing social platforms for your business. It’s more important to understand the needs of your target customers and where they tend to spend their time. Avoid wasting time on platforms where your target customers are not active by keeping an eye on their behaviors.
3) Setting KPIs
Regardless of your goals or industry, your social media strategy should be data-driven. Focus on data that directly matches your objectives rather than vanity metrics that don’t aid in measuring your business’s performance or state.
Key metrics for measuring social media marketing results include:
- Reach: The number of people who have seen your content at least once during a specific period. This counts each viewer once, even if they view the content multiple times.
- Clicks: The number of clicks on your content or account. Tracking clicks per campaign is crucial for understanding what drives curiosity or encourages purchases.
- Frequency: The average number of times each person sees your content. It’s calculated by dividing the number of impressions by the reach. Frequency can help gauge the audience’s willingness to interact with your brand.
- The difference in likes between organic and paid content: Understanding the difference in likes between organic and paid content can help effectively allocate your time and budget towards advertising expenses and content planning in different formats.
4) Competitor Research
Take time to identify and understand your competitors through market research, what they are doing well, and what they are not. Competitor research can inform you of what the industry expects from your company, helping you set your unique social media goals.
5) Creating Compelling Content
With countless businesses doing social media marketing worldwide, most social media users have likely come across content from related businesses. Therefore, you need content that makes users want to hit the ‘follow’ button and receive updates related to your brand.
6) Drafting a Content Calendar
Create a social media content calendar to plan when to upload content, track what has been posted, and collaborate with teams from different departments. A content calendar is especially useful if you manage multiple social media accounts. It helps efficiently manage posting content, tailoring it to each platform, and deciding what content to post on each account.
5. Metrics for Measuring Social Media Marketing
It’s crucial to assess how social media marketing has been executed and the results it has achieved to meet business objectives. This requires tracking all posts across all your social media platforms. Social media marketing metrics can be considered the data related to the impact your content has on customers across various platforms. Important metrics to track on social media include, but are not limited to, those mentioned earlier, and vary depending on the platform.
- Engagement: There are various types of engagement specific to each platform, generally including post clicks, comments, likes, and responses to content.
- Reach: The number of users who have seen a page, profile, or content.
- Followers: The number of users who have clicked the follow button and regularly see the content in their feed.
- Impressions: The number of times a profile or content has been viewed, regardless of whether the target clicked on the post.
- Video Views: The number of views for video content.
- Profile Visits: The number of people who have opened your social media page.
- Mentions: The number of times other people’s profiles are mentioned in a post.
- Tags: Cases where customers add your company profile name or hashtag to other posts.
- Reposts: Cases where customers repost other users’ content on their profile.
- Shares: Posts where customers share your company’s content with their network.
Just like generating marketing leads and increasing conversions, social media marketing requires setting appropriate strategies based on objectives, creating content, and checking metrics to assess content efficiency.
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