Day 25 New Day New Learning

What’s Social Media Marketing?

There are hundreds of different definitions of social media marketing. In essence, social media marketing involves creating tailored content for specific social media platforms to boost engagement and increase exposure.

In recent years, it has become more and more obvious that each social media platform requires unique content. While pictures and videos excel on Instagram, the likes of LinkedIn lend themselves to blog posts and textual content. This difference is just one reason why we’re delving into them individually in the second half of this guide.

Within a social media marketing strategy, you need to consider how your brand can gain maximum exposure and engagement on each platform. We aren’t saying you need to be active on a dozen platforms, but you should at least be active on the platforms that house a good percentage of your audience.

Current Social Media Trends

What seems to be happening in the social media space right now? Let’s take a look.

Organic Growth is Difficult — As the saying once went, ‘create great content and the people will come’. Sadly, this is no longer the case and you won’t necessarily be inundated with likes and comments after a particularly good blog post.

Why has this changed? In a word, ads. Though Facebook is known for ads, it’s a trend affecting all social media platforms and it means that organic reach is much harder to obtain. Over the course of a few months, organic reach actually decreased by 50% on Facebook. Although this can be frustrating, we also have to remember that social media platforms are free services trying to make money.

Merging Channels and Tools — Every month, more platforms and tools are merging, and this will be important in the future. For example, remember when cart abandonment messages were restricted to emails? Now, we can receive similar messages through Facebook Messenger.

What’s more, it’s possible to log into all sorts of tools by simply logging into our Google or Facebook accounts. MailChimp even allows users to create Facebook Ads from their platform. As time goes on, more examples will be found, and we think this makes social media marketing easier than ever before.

Pay for Exposure — As we’ve already seen, organic reach is down, and this suggests an end to the free word-of-mouth era on social media. Now, the algorithms on social media prioritize paid ads.

As long as you’re confident your audience can be found on a specific platform, we don’t see why this investment should be a problem. With billions of people on these websites, it should be a focal point of the strategy anyway.

Artificial intelligence, including generative AI, is used in advertising today to do everything from generating ad creative and copy to optimizing ad budgets and predicting advertising campaign performance. You can even use AI to scale up ad creative almost instantaneously or spy on your competition's ad strategy.

Almost every ad you see online relies on AI to reach your eyes and ears in real time. Today's leading ad platforms, like Google Ads and Meta Ads, use AI to sell, target, and place ads micro-second by micro-second across vast ad networks that span millions of digital destinations, apps, and experiences.