Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with
your audience to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic.
This involves publishing great content on your social media profiles, listening
to and engaging your followers, analyzing your results, and running social
media advertisements.

The major social media platforms (at the moment) are Facebook, Instagram,
Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat.

There are also a range of social media management tools that help businesses
to get the most out of the social media platforms listed above. For example,
Buffer is a platform of social media management tools, which can help you
achieve success with your social media marketing. Whether you want to build
a brand or grow your business, we want to help you succeed.

A Quick Overview of Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing first started with publishing. Businesses were
sharing their content on social media to generate traffic to their websites
and, hopefully, sales. But social media has matured far beyond being
just a place to broadcast content.

Nowadays, businesses use social media in a myriad of different ways.
For example, a business that is concerned about what people are saying
about its brand would monitor social media conversations and response
to relevant mentions (social media listening and engagement). A business
that wants to understand how it’s performing on social media would analyze
its reach, engagement, and sales on social media with an analytics tool
(social media analytics). A business that wants to reach a specific set of
audience at scale would run highly-targeted social media ads (social media advertising).

As a whole, these are often also known as social media management.

The three Core Pillars of Social Media Marketing

1. Strategy

Before you dive right in and publish something on social media, let’s take
a step back and look at the bigger picture. The first step is to think about
your social media strategy.

What are your goals? How can social media help you achieve your 
business goals? Some businesses use social media for increasing their
brand awareness, others use it for driving website traffic and sales. Social
media can also help you generate engagement around your brand, create
a community, and serve as a customer support channel for your customers.

Which social media platforms do you want to focus on? The
major social media platforms, mentioned above, are Facebook, Instagram,
Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat. There are also smaller
and up-and-coming platforms, such as Tumblr, Tik Tok, and Anchor, and
social messaging platforms, such as Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat.
When starting out, it’s better to pick a few platforms that you think your target
audience is on than to be on all platforms.

What type of content do you want to share? What type of content
will attract your target audience best? Is it images, videos, or links? Is it
educational or entertaining content? A good place to start is to create a
marketing persona, which will help you answer these questions. And this
doesn’t have to be fixed forever; you can always change your strategy
according to how your social media posts perform.

To help you create a great social media strategy, here are our long-form,
step-by-step guides on creating a social media strategy and social media 
marketing plan.

2. Planning and Publishing

Social media marketing for small businesses usually starts with having a
 consistent presence on social media. Close to three billion people
(3,000,000,000!) use social media. By being present on social media
platforms, you give your brand an opportunity to be discovered by your
future customers.

Publishing to social media is as simple as sharing a blog post, an image,
or a video on a social media platform. It’s just like how you would share on
your personal Facebook profile. But you will want to plan your content ahead
of time instead of creating and publishing content spontaneously. Also, to
ensure that you are maximizing your reach on social media, you need to
publish great content that your audience likes, at the right timing and frequency.

There are now a variety of social media scheduling tools, such as Buffer 
Publish, that can help you publish your content automatically at your preferred
time. This saves you time and allows you to reach your audience when they are
most likely to engage with your content.

3. Listening and Engagement

As your business and social media following grow, conversations about your
brand will also increase. People will comment on your social media posts, tag
you in their social media posts, or message you directly.

People might even talk about your brand on social media without letting you
know. So you will want to monitor social media conversations about your
brand. If it’s a positive comment, you get a chance to surprise and delight
them. Otherwise, you can offer support and correct a situation before it gets
worse.

You can manually check all your notifications across all the social media
platforms but this isn’t efficient and you won’t see posts that didn’t tag your
business’s social media profile. You can instead use a social media listening 
and engagement tool, such as Buffer Reply, that aggregates all your social
media mentions and messages, including posts that didn’t tag your business’s
social media profile.