Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing refers to the process of gaining website traffic or attention through social media sites. It focuses on the efforts to create content that entices the audience and encourages readers to share it with their social networks. This form of marketing is driven by word-of-mouth, meaning it results in earned media rather than paid media. Moreover, social media serves as a relatively inexpensive platform for organizations to implement marketing campaigns.

In this digital era, most of the people have social presence and with the emergence of smartphones and tablets, it has led to increase in social activity. It has been seen that 27% of total time spent by people online is devoted to social media. Hence, social media marketing has become an essential tool for the success of any business. In the past few years, social media has changed the way businesses communicate with their customers and the general public. This has made social media a powerful medium for brands and marketers to reach out to their customers.

Everyone knows the basics of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Vine, Instagram and others, there is much more to them than simply creating a buzz. Social media platforms have evolved a lot since their inception and viewers have become much more knowledgeable. You must know how to leverage all the built-in features of each platform for your marketing efforts to succeed.

Steps to Plan Your Social Media Strategy

Develop an Effective Brand Identity

Consumers today are sophisticated and smart and want meaningful information. If they get that, they’ll connect instantly with a brand. If your content is valuable, relevant, and clear and can connect emotionally with the audience fulfilling their need, it helps to create a long lasting brand identity which goes a long way in increasing ROI.

Identify Your Target Audience

Choosing your target audience arbitrarily is a wastage of marketing efforts. Defining your target audience which is interested in your products and services and focusing your efforts on them would help you to make optimum use of your resources.

Here's the flow you should go for:

• Discover the USP of your product and decide whom you should sell it to?
• Research about your industry, market, competition and potential customers
• Develop your customer profile based on demographic information (gender, age, location, marital status, income etc.) and psychographic information (hobbies, interests, lifestyles, behaviors etc.)
• Research on the websites and social networks they usually frequent and how they do it. This will help you to deliver your message more effectively.
• Keep yourself updated on the latest industry and market trends and monitor the situation by tracking website visits, clicks, shares, information requests, sales and such things.

Define Clear Business Goals

In order to generate leads and drive conversions from social media, you need a well-defined digital strategy that incorporates social networks.

You need to set goals based on the following factors:

• Which networks you want to focus your efforts on?
• At what rate do you want to grow your subscribers, followers across various networks?
• How many comments and shares do you want to generate for each network?
• Based on your social activity, how much traffic, purchases or other engagement do you want?
• You must take the S.M.A.R.T. approach for your objectives - make them Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound.
• You can measure your brand success with each social media and adjust your approach accordingly.

Choose Social Platforms Based on Your Target Audience

Each social network has different user demographics and you must choose the networks based on your potential customers. Research on the social platforms wherein you think you'll find most of your potential customers and target your efforts towards the same.

Get Familiar with Functions of Various Social Platforms

Each platform has its own unique rules, benefits and drawbacks. Knowing the functionality of each platform and the differences among them is crucial to make your marketing efforts successful.

Each social media platform has a different way in which you can present your content and you have to restructure it to suit each platform. For instance, Twitter is a microblogging site, YouTube is a video sharing site, Google+ and Facebook are social networks and so on. Each of these platforms cater to a different set of audience which you need to keep in mind while devising your e-marketing plan. Using these social media platforms properly goes a long way in increasing customer engagement and strengthening your brand.

Integrate Social Media Into Your Website

Integrate relevant social media platforms into your website. As social platforms like Facebook, Twitter etc. have thousands of users and provide ease of sharing content, it can help you reach out to thousands of potential customers.

Create a Schedule for Your Posts and Updates

After creating a post, you can decide upon the time when you want to publish it. Various free, low-cost or premium social media management tools such as Hootsuite or Buffer help you to schedule your posts for each platform in such a way that they produce the maximum effect. You can also opt for auto-responder emails in case of certain site interactions or automate your video postings. Creating a content schedule will help you to manage your content effectively, save time and resources, keep your readers engaged and thus increasing their interactions and involvement.

Content Presentation on Different Social Platforms

People like to see different content on different social platforms. Even if you have the same content to be shared among various social platforms, make sure that it is presented in innovative ways on all different platforms. This keeps the audience engaged and prevents it from being monotonous.

Use Social Media Analytics for Insights

Analytics will help you to measure your business's performance on social media by collecting data and understanding the trends, opinions, attitudes and preferences of your consumers that will help you to predict their behavior and make smart decisions based on them and thus, helping you to manage your social media marketing effectively.

Some of the popular free analytics tools available include Google Analytics (with its new social reporting feature), Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics and SumAll.

Refine Your Tactics to Increase ROI

Analyze the reports to adjust your tactics to determine the course of your future campaigns. Keep refining your tactics and introduce changes which you think will enhance the output of the campaign. This will improve your marketing efficiency and give you better results. It will increase your ROI.