What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc.., to connect with your prospects and customers to drive website traffic, build your brand, and increase sales. This involves posting great content on your social media channels, listening to and engaging with your followers, analyzing your results, and running social media campaigns.

Social Media Platform Users Statistics in 2021

1.Facebook

Facebook has 2.80 billion monthly active users in 2021.It has 1.84 billion active users that are visiting the Facebook site on daily basis. It is the most popular social network.

Ideal for B2C Marketing

2.Instagram

Instagram has 500 million active users accessing the Instagram site on daily basis.

Ideal for B2C Marketing

3.LinkedIn

LinkedIn has 740 million members with over 50 million registered companies. 40% of the users access the platform on daily basis clocking up over 1 billion interactions every month.

Ideal for B2B Marketing

4.YouTube

YouTube has 2.3 billion users worldwide. It is ranked as the second most popular social network.

Ideal for B2C Marketing

5.Twitter

Twitter has 192 million daily active users. 63 percent of users are between 35 and 65.

Ideal for B2B and B2C Marketing

Top 12 Benefits of Social Media Marketing

1.Increase Brand Awareness

Social Media Marketing is one of the best ways to increase your brand awareness across globe. Social Media help you to directly engage with your audience by posting interesting content on your social media channels and you can ask your followers to like, share and comment on your social media channels to reach wider audience. It also helps in directing traffic to your website by posting links on your posts

2.Generate Leads and Boost Sales

Social Media Marketing offers an easy way to generate inbound leads, it can be done by organic and paid advertising. By sharing your products/service and promoting it on your social media channels you can increase your website traffic, improve lead generation and increase your sales.

3.Enhance Customer Loyalty

Social Media Marketing helps to enhance your customer loyalty by directly engaging with them. By connecting and engaging with your customers on social media to ensure the best service of your product and service you will be able to build a lasting relationship with your customers and your business.

4.Build a Community

Social Media Marketing helps you to build a community of followers who are interested in your product/service offerings across globe. These followers would become your customers eventually, they help to reach wider audience, build trust on your brand and become the brand ambassador of your business.

5.Cost Effective

Social Media Marketing is possibly the most cost-effective part of a marketing strategy to any business. Signing up and creating social media profiles is totally free in all major social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube. If you have marketing budget allocated for social media marketing you can utilize their paid advertising service.

6.Drive Traffic to Website and Blogs

Social Media Marketing helps you to drive traffic to your website and blogs by sharing links on your post which can direct to your prospects and customers to your website and blogs when your audience click on the links. Driving traffic to your website and blogs through social media channels can be done by organic and paid advertising.

7.Thought Leadership

Social Media Marketing provides the opportunity to establish your brand as a thought leader in your niche. Engaging your followers with insightful and well written content on your social media channels is a great way to become an expert in your niche. Thought leadership is one of the best ways to develop trust with your prospects and customers.

8.Competitor Analysis

Social Media helps in listening to competitors, you can keep a track of your competitor companies’ product updates. If a customer of your competitor is facing an issue with your competitor product you can directly engage with the customer via social media if you could solve the customer’s pain point.

9.Partner with Social Media Influencers

Social Media offers an opportunity to partner with Social Media Influencers to promote your brand to reach wider audience. Social Media influencers are the people who have huge followers on social media channels who can direct their followers towards your brand. According to a survey, word of mouth drives 20 – 50 purchasing decisions. When you get these social media influencers talking about your brand on social media channels your brand gets the credibility which boost your sales.

10.Social Media acts as customer support

Customers expects brands to be available on social media platforms so they could reach out to them anytime for customer support. Brands can also directly engage with the customers who seek for customer support by responding to their customers concerns.

11.Listen to your audience through Social Listening

Social Listening offers you an opportunity to listen to your prospects and customers social conversions around certain topics. You can learn about your audience pain points and you could offer them solution.

12.Social Media Insights

Social Media Insights are data which help you to understand the success of your posts on various social media platforms. These insights are the data which help you track the engagement like the no of followers, likes, shares, comments on each platform.

Identify your Target Audience

There are several Social Media platforms available in the market. You need to identify the right set of social media platforms for your business by understanding where your target audience are active.

For Example, – If you are into B2C business targeting to millennials the ideal platform for your business would be Instagram.

For Example, – If you are into B2B business targeting to other business the ideal platform for your business would be LinkedIn.

Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy

Once you identified the right set of social media platform for your business, then you need to create a marketing strategy to attract and engage with your audience.

• Content Planning

Create unique and engaging content to attract your potential prospects and customers. Identify the trends which is relevant to your business and create content according to the trends. Check your competitors page and understand what type of content they are creating and sharing, based on that you can try to create similar content.

• Schedule Posting

Organize a schedule to post on your social media platforms. Research and Identify when your target audience is active on the social media platform based on their time schedule your post.

Tools like Hootsuite and Sprout social help you in scheduling your post in advance and it also provides the opportunity to track and monitor your post’s performance on various social media platforms.

• Post Frequently

Post frequently on your social media platforms to engage with your target audience. It helps you in growing your followers in longer term. If you are not posting frequent on your social media platforms you followers may forgot you and you would start losing your followers.