The process of social media marketing comprises of creating and sharing content on different social media platforms, communicating with followers, and utilizing social media marketing software for advertising. Generally, one can employ social media management software to arrange and release a range of posts, sustain their online visibility, and streamline their operations.
There are multiple social media platforms available for a company to interact with current clientele and attract new ones. Additionally, the company can utilize integrated analytics to monitor the effectiveness of their strategies.
Social media marketing pillars
To guarantee full coverage, make sure to progress your brand through all five essential aspects of social media marketing. These five pillars are crucial to successful social media marketing.
- Strategy
In order to fully utilize the potential of social media, it is essential to develop a comprehensive social media plan before getting started with any implementation.
This comprises of:
- Determining the business goals you’re looking to achieve. For instance, maybe you want to expand brand awareness, drive sales, or get an increase in website traffic. Creating a social media strategy helps you generate engagement around your brand and its products while creating a community and building customer trust.
- Choosing the right social network platforms. Whether you pick Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok, the strategy will look different on each site. Consider which social network platform your target audience uses most.
- Choosing the type of content to share. Is your brand going to opt for images, videos, or links? Will it be entertaining or educational? Remember that what you decide doesn’t have to be the strategy forever. Switch things up if the social media content isn’t working how you thought it would!
- Planning
After establishing a strategy, the next step is to prepare and post content regularly on social media platforms that matches the brand. This will aid existing and potential customers in discovering you. It is essential to schedule content in advance instead of making and posting it concurrently.
Initiating publication involves clicking to share a blog post, video, or image on a social media platform. It is crucial to bear in mind timing and frequency when doing so. A social media post ought not to be scheduled for launch in the wee hours of the night. Furthermore, it is unsuitable to post 20 tweets within a single day.
- Engagement
As you consistently publish content, your business and its social media presence will expand gradually. Consequently, discussions about your brand will escalate, encompassing remarks on your posts, references to you in posts from other brands, replies to your tweets, or direct messaging.
It is conceivable that patrons may mention your brand without including a tag. Hence, it is vital to listen to, monitor, and participate in as many conversations as feasible. While engaging with your audience, be attentive to both favorable and unfavorable discussions. If a customer resorts to social media to express dissatisfaction with your offerings, seize the moment to make things right or provide assistance.
- Analytics
Following that are analytics and reporting, providing a comprehensive evaluation of your data to reveal the performance of your social posts. Specific social platforms, such as Twitter Analytics, assist in configuring this information, making it effortless to identify successful approaches and areas that require improvement.
There are certain metrics that you can keep track of.
- Engagement. Clicks, comments, likes and replies on your posts. Some platforms go even further with specific engagement types. For instance, TikTok and Instagram include “saved” posts.
- Reach. The number of users who have seen your most recent content.
- Impressions. The number of times a post from your profile or page was seen by users. Impressions count whether the post was clicked on or not.
- Mentions. The number of times your profile’s name has been mentioned in posts. Sometimes called “tags”, they often begin with the @ symbol.
- Followers. The number of people who have clicked the Follow button on your account to see your content and posts regularly.
- Video views. On TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat, you can see how many views your videos have received.
- Profile visits. The number of people who have visited your social profile or main page.
- Shares. The number of times users reshare your posts to their network.
Questions such as can be answered by these metrics:
- Are we reaching more people this month vs. last month?
- How many positive mentions did we get this month?
- Are people using our brand’s hashtags on social posts?
- Are we on track to hit a certain number of followers by the end of the year?
- Advertising
As time goes by, your brand can get to a stage where it has the resources to expand its marketing campaigns to incorporate social media advertising, which enables the audience to connect with a more extensive group compared to your current followers.
You have the ability to target and design custom ads that cater to diverse interests, behaviors, demographics, and geographic locations. Social media advertising software is commonly utilized by businesses to facilitate these endeavors by managing, purchasing, and positioning advertisements on specific platforms.
Anthony Astacio, Quigley Simpson’s Paid Social Manager, emphasizes the significance of selecting the appropriate platform for your brand. Understanding the most suitable platform for your brand requires several considerations. Firstly, your budget plays a crucial role. A larger budget typically means more flexibility and the chance to use multiple platforms. Additionally, the type of creatives such as videos and images, and the campaign’s end goal must also be taken into account.
Astacio advises to determine if visitors to the site have seen the ads and made a purchase. The analysis may reveal that videos are more watched on TikTok and Instagram generates more website traffic, while the majority of purchases are made through Facebook ads. This information can guide advertisers in allocating their resources based on their objectives.
Benefits of social media marketing
Achieving several benefits is possible by dedicating time and effort to properly executing SMM. The potential outcomes of social media marketing are:
- Increase brand awareness: Unsure if social media marketing is a tactic you want to spend time on? Think about the thousands, and even millions, of people who have active social media accounts. You don’t want to miss out on reaching them and creating a presence for your brand and its services.
- Humanize a business: As you build a social media profile, your posts and interactions with users will show customers that your brand and persona are approachable and trustworthy. Over time, your audience will grow familiar with your brand and form a connection.
- Drive traffic: You’ve got your website link in your profile’s bio. You share links to blog posts with your followers. You run compelling ads. All these actions combined on social media sites will increase traffic to your company’s website, making it easier to turn visitors into customers.
- Build a community: SMM shouldn’t only be about selling and promoting your products and services. Successful brands turn to social media platforms to connect, engage, and build a community within their industry or niche.
- Enhance relationships with customers: Social media creates indirect and direct lines of communication with followers, so it’s possible to network, collect feedback, hold discussions, and connect with them as individuals.
- Generate more leads and conversions: When done well, your efforts on social media, especially on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, help generate leads. You’ll likely build a better database of prospects that convert into customers when you mix consistent posting and engaging with followers with other strategies, like video content marketing and email opt-ins.
- Build relationships at a low cost: SMM is ideal for small businesses and brands on a budget. It’s usually free to create a profile, grow a social media presence, and engage with your audience.
- Keep tabs on the competition: Whether it’s learning from their tactics, the products they post about, or their campaigns, social media marketing provides a competitive analysis of competing brands and how they interact with their followers and subscribers. You can also note what’s working and not working for competing brands and see what you can do to better stand out from the crowd.
The reality of using hashtags for business
Although hashtags may appear to be the prodigies of social media, they may not always yield optimal results, potentially leading to negative impacts on your outreach and involvement.
is the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user’s content on social media platforms without their knowledge, resulting in fewer viewers seeing their posts. Shadowbanning involves secretly limiting a user’s reach on social media platforms by blocking or partially blocking their content, leading to a decrease in the number of viewers who see their posts.
If you select incorrect hashtags, you may fall into the trap of shadowbanning. This strategy involves covertly censoring content, making it invisible to users and severing all connections with the hashtags employed. Although your active followers may still be able to view your content, the algorithm will essentially downvote it.
In what way do hashtags have the potential to result in a shadowban? When you incorporate a flagged hashtag, your content may be shadowbanned. For instance, Pinterest and Instagram shadowbanned illness-related hashtags during the peak of the Coronavirus outbreak to limit the spread of misinformation that was rampant in the initial stages. Though this was a prudent course of action, it proved to be problematic for numerous influencers and enterprises that utilized the tag for community engagement and shared experiences.
Instagram may shadowban users if they are suspected of utilizing bots or paid following services that breach their terms. Employing the same hashtags repeatedly, without any changes, is an example of something that could lead to getting banned.
Dependence on hashtags
A frequent problem in social media marketing is overdependence on hashtags by certain businesses. Instead of investing efforts and resources in creating compelling content, marketers focus excessively on the use of hashtags.
Although researching hashtags is crucial for taking advantage of this opportunity, it doesn’t guarantee success in social media marketing. If the content your business posts is not of high quality, your audience will simply keep scrolling past without any interaction.
Merely having your content viewed is insufficient; it must provide worth in order to engage your spectators.
Engaging in the practice of manipulating statistics or data.
Marketers often have a significant disparity between their expectations and the reality when it comes to interpreting hashtag data. They often make the mistake of assuming that a hashtag with millions of posts will help them reach millions of potential followers.
If you are trying to compete with millions of other posts, especially those from accounts with higher numbers of followers and engagement, you are unlikely to succeed. Your content will most likely be overshadowed in the feed and not reach anyone.
It is recommended that marketers create a mixture of popular and less popular hashtags for every post, including around five hashtags that have millions of posts and approximately twenty that have less than 100,000.
Creating an effective hashtag strategy
Having knowledge about the different types of hashtags to use and how to use them efficiently is necessary to establish a successful hashtag plan. The following suggestions can assist you in managing hashtags.
Types of hashtags to use
Different subsets are formed within hashtags based on the content they represent. Among the most popular classes of hashtags are:
- Product Hashtags – these are related to the product or service you’re offering, such as #gymattire or #financialadvisor.
- Brand Hashtags – these are developed as an identifier for your business, such as Gloveworx’s #BecomeUnstoppable or GRRRL Clothing’s #grrrlarmy
- Campaign Hashtags – these track specific campaigns, such as Coca-Cola’s #ShareACoke and Oreo’s #OreoHorrorStories.
- Trending and Seasonal Hashtags – these are hashtags that are trending with challenges or topical content and seasonal hashtags surrounding holidays and events— for example, daily selfie posts with selfie hashtags or content about New Year’s Eve.
- Niche and Relevant Hashtags – these are relevant to what your audience is interested in, both in general and specific to your industry niche.
It is essential to diversify and create a variety of hashtags, although you may use a few that repeat in your posts. Appropriate implementation of business hashtags can yield significant results.
Use social listening
Social listening can be a useful addition to the various tools and guides available for selecting appropriate hashtags. While relying solely on such apps may have its advantages, incorporating social listening into your hashtag strategy can also be wise.
Social listening involves observing your target audience and analyzing their discussions about your company and other related topics that may be significant to your business. As an illustration, a beauty brand can notice that a lot of its social media followers include #selfcare when discussing their experiences with facial masks. This awareness would permit the company to customize its content and create a deeper connection with its audience by utilizing suitable hashtags.
Examining comparable businesses and accounts that you aspire to imitate using social listening can also be advantageous. Analyze their successful practices and draw motivation from them for your hashtag strategy.
