Social Media Marketing
A social media marketing strategy is a summary of everything you plan to do and hope to achieve on social media. It guides your actions and lets you know whether you’re succeeding or failing. Every post, reply, like, and comment should serve a purpose.
The more specific your strategy is, the more effective the execution will be. Keep it concise. Don’t make your plan so lofty and broad that it’s unattainable or impossible to measure
One of the key components of SMM is social media optimization (SMO). Like search engine optimization (SEO), SMO is a strategy for drawing new and unique visitors to a website. SMO can be done two ways: adding social media links to content, such as RSS feeds and sharing buttons -- or promoting activity through social media by updating statuses or tweets, or blog posts.
Social media marketing is a powerful way for businesses of all sizes to reach prospects and customers. Your customers are already interacting with brands through social media, and if you're not speaking directly to your audience through social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, you're missing out! Great marketing on social media can bring remarkable success to your business, creating devoted brand advocates and even driving leads and sales.
Some of the famous Social Media are-.
- Google+
- YouTube
- Snapchat
- Tumblr
- Medium
- Quora
Strategies
Passive approach
Social media can be a useful source of market information and a way to hear customer perspectives. Blogs, content communities, and forums are platforms where individuals share their reviews and recommendations of brands, products, and services. Businesses are able to tap and analyze the customer voices and feedback generated in social media for marketing purposes; in this sense, the social media is a relatively inexpensive source of market intelligence which can be used by marketers and managers to track and respond to consumer-identified problems and detect market opportunities. For example, the Internet erupted with videos and pictures of the iPhone 6 "bend test" which showed that the coveted phone could be bent by hand pressure. The so-called "bend gate" controversy created confusion amongst customers who had waited months for the launch of the latest rendition of the iPhone. However, Apple promptly issued a statement saying that the problem was extremely rare and that the company had taken several steps to make the mobile device's case stronger and robust. Unlike traditional market research methods such as surveys, focus groups, and data mining which are time-consuming and costly, and which take weeks or even months to analyze, marketers can use social media to obtain 'live' or "real-time" information about consumer behavior and viewpoints on a company's brand or products. This can be useful in the highly dynamic, competitive, fast-paced and global marketplace of the 2010s
Active approach
Social media can be used not only as public relations and direct marketing tools but also as communication channels targeting very specific audiences with social media influencers and social media personalities and as effective customer engagement tools. Technologies predating social media, such as broadcast TV and newspapers can also provide advertisers with a fairly targeted audience, given that an ad placed during a sports game broadcast or in the sports section of a newspaper is likely to be read by sports fans. However, social media websites can target niche markets even more precisely. Using digital tools such as Google Adsense, advertisers can target their ads to very specific demographics, such as people who are interested in social entrepreneurship, political activism associated with a particular political party, or video gaming. Google Adsense does this by looking for keywords in social media user's online posts and comments. It would be hard for a TV station or paper-based newspaper to provide ads that are this targeted (though not impossible, as can be seen with "special issue" sections on niche issues, which newspapers can use to sell targeted ads).
Some Steps to follow-
- Set your social media marketing goals
- Research your audience
- Establish the important metrics
- Analyze your competition
- Make less time reading your top priority
- check your result and optimize
Set your social media marketing goals
One of the main goals is creating brand awareness. Brand awareness is all about your brand becoming relevant to potential buyers. This means posting content regularly that answers the questions your customers are asking. That content includes links to blog posts, infographics, statistics, and relevant articles. But don’t forget to show the world who your brand is by posting photos of employees, the office, and company events. You can also post humorous, relevant memes that support your brand. This will help build a connection with customers.
Research your audience
Knowing who your audience—and ideal customer—is and what they want to see on social is key to creating content that they will like, comment on, and share. It’s also critical if you want to turn social media followers into customers for your business.
Try creating audience/buyer personas. These allow you to think of your potential fans, followers, and customers as real people with real wants and needs. And that will allow you to think more clearly about what to offer them.
Establish the important metrics
Analyze your competition
A competitive analysis allows you to understand who the competition is and what they’re doing well (and not so well). You’ll get a good sense of what’s expected in your industry, which will help you set social media targets of your own.
This analysis will also help you spot opportunities. For example, maybe one of your competitors is dominant on Facebook but has put little effort into Twitter or Instagram. You might want to focus on the networks where your audience is underserved, rather than trying to win fans away from a dominant player.
Make less time reading your top priority
here you have to manage the time of reading your content, Time is very important for you and every other and everyone wants to know the solution and news within less time. No one want's to go though the all long post. They only want a short and optimized solution or post.
check your result and optimize
If you’re already using social media tools, you need to take a step back and look at what you’ve already done and accomplished. Ask yourself the following questions:
- What’s working, and what’s not?
- Who is connecting with you on social?
- Which networks does your target audience use?
- How does your social media presence compare to that of your competitors?
Once you gather all this information in one place, you’ll have a good starting point for planning how to improve your results.
Some Advantages of Social Media Marketing.
Large and More Brand Authority
Customer satisfaction and brand loyalty both play a part in making your business more authoritative, but it all comes down to communication. When consumers see your company posting on social media, especially replying to customers and posting original content, it makes you appear more credible. Regularly interacting with customers demonstrates that your business cares about customer satisfaction, and is available to answer any questions that they might have. Satisfied customers are eager to spread the word about a great product or service and they usually turn to social media to express their opinion. Having customers mention your business on social media will advertise your business, and show new visitors your value and brand authority. Once you obtain a few satisfied customers who are vocal about their positive purchase experience, you can let the advertising be done for you by actual customers who enjoyed your product or service.
Better Search Engine Rankings.
Better Targeting
SEO is the best way to capture relevant traffic from search engines, but the requirements for success are always changing. It’s no longer enough to regularly update your blog, ensure optimized title tags and meta descriptions, and distribute links pointing back to your site. Google and other search engines may be calculating their rankings using social media presence as a significant factor, because of the fact that strong brands almost always use social media. As such, being active on social media could act as a “brand signal” to search engines that your brand is legitimate, credible, and trustworthy. That means if you want to rank for a given set of keywords, having a strong social media presence could be almost mandatory.
Social media has made it a million times easier to reach the right audience by providing a level of granularity to targeting no traditional advertising medium was ever capable of. This is really the age of micro-targeting, where a potential customer base can be narrowed down to the level of an area pin code. Varied interests, right from playing football to listening to jazz music, in-market segments (which are groups of individuals who are actively searching for a product/ service similar to yours across the Google display network) and the ability to target a lookalike audience are just a few cases that illustrate our point
Better customer satisfaction
It is human nature to attract attention. Establishing social media marketing allows one to respond to a specific customer at a time. Customers do really appreciate when they know they will get a personalized response when they post comments on your page rather than get an automated message response. It shows that you are attentive and caring. This puts you as a marketer at an advantage position since more customers will be attracted.
Large Audience
When you advertise on a website or in a magazine, you have limited access, but social media sites give business owners access to a large audience who can choose to "like" or "follow" your business and its updates. Facebook alone has more than 750 million users, LinkedIn has over 120 million users and over 3 billion YouTube videos are viewed per day
Customer Service
This might be one of the top reasons for your business to be active on social media - these days, people simply expect brands to be available on social media, and they're increasingly going to brands social profiles first for customer service queries.
The faster you can respond, and the better you are able to help, the more likely it is that those people will become customers, and recommend your business to others.
Study Your Competition
It’s also important to know what people are saying about your competitors.
For example, tracking mentions of your competitors might reveal pain points with their products that you could reach out to address, winning new customers in the process.
How fast are your competitors responding to customers complaints? Long enough for you to step in and solve their problems with your brand?
As you can see, there's a range of potential benefits to society, and while it does take some work, the rewards can be great, when you approach the medium in a strategic, focused way.
An Organic Approach
If that was all too much exulting in social media’s advantages, just take this away: social media’s main advantage versus traditional media is its organic way of interacting with your brand’s consumers directly, in a way that builds your image as a brand that cares. (or that can at least tweet funny pictures)
User Friendly
Brand Credibility:
Regular social updates by your business on social media will help create loyal and satisfied customers as they see constant activity and replies to their comments and suggestions. This helps make a positive image in their minds and gives them a feeling of being cared for. Thus, you need to once get customers who are loyal to you because of the highly positive experience. Such customers, if they are vocal, can be the real brand ambassadors which will add credibility to every campaign you lead.
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