With over 80% of consumers reporting that social media—especially influencer content—significantly impacts buying decisions, marketers across industries are driving the evolution of social media marketing (SMM) from a stand-alone tool to a multipronged source of marketing intelligence on an increasingly important—and growing—audience.
Within 18 years, from 2004 (when MySpace became the first social media site to reach one million users) to 2022, the dramatic growth of interactive digital channels took social media to levels that challenge even the reach of television and radio.
By Q1 of 2022, there were 4.6 billion social media users globally—over 58% of the world’s population—an increase of over 10% in one year alone.
As the use of social media trends upward, marketers are perfecting strategies to capture the significant competitive advantage that engagement with this key audience can deliver even more rapidly and effectively than traditional marketing.
What Is Social Media Marketing (SMM)?
Social media marketing (SMM) (also known as digital marketing and e-marketing) is the use of social media—the platforms on which users build social networks and share information—to build a company’s brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. In addition to providing companies with a way to engage with existing customers and reach new ones, social media marketing (SMM) has purpose-built data analytics that allow marketers to track the success of their efforts and identify even more ways to engage.
Why Is Social Media Marketing So Powerful?
The power of social media marketing (SMM) is driven by the unparalleled capacity of social media in three core marketing areas: connection, interaction, and customer data.
Connection: Not only does social media enable businesses to connect with customers in ways that were previously impossible, but there is also an extraordinary range of avenues to connect with target audiences—from content platforms (like YouTube) and social sites (like Facebook) to microblogging services (like Twitter).
Interaction: The dynamic nature of the interaction on social media—whether direct communication or passive “liking”—enables businesses to leverage free advertising opportunities from eWOM (electronic word-of-mouth) recommendations between existing and potential customers. Not only is the positive contagion effect from eWOM a valuable driver of consumer decisions, but the fact that these interactions happen on the social network makes them measurable. For example, businesses can measure their “social equity”—a term for the return on investment (ROI) from their social media marketing (SMM) campaigns.
Customer Data: A well-designed social media marketing (SMM) plan delivers another invaluable resource to boost marketing outcomes: customer data. Rather than being overwhelmed by the 3Vs of big data (volume, variety, and velocity), SMM tools have the capacity not only to extract customer data but also to turn this gold into actionable market analysis—or even to use the data to crowdsource new strategies.
How Social Media Marketing Works
As platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram took off, social media transformed not only the way we connect with one another but also the way businesses are able to influence consumer behavior—from promoting content that drives engagement to extracting geographic, demographic, and personal information that makes messaging resonate with users.
SMM Action Plan: The more targeted your social media marketing (SMM) strategy is, the more effective it will be. Hootsuite, a leading software provider in the social media management space, recommends the following action plan to build an SMM campaign that has an execution framework as well as performance metrics:
- Align SMM goals to clear business objectives
- Learn your target customer (age, location, income, job title, industry, interests)
- Conduct a competitive analysis of your competition (successes and failures)
- Audit your current SMM (successes and failures)
- Create a calendar for SMM content delivery
- Create best-in-class content
- Track performance and adjust SMM strategy as needed
Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Compared to traditional marketing, social media marketing has several distinct advantages, including the fact that SMM has two kinds of interaction that enables targeted customer relationship management (CRM) tools: both customer-to-customer and firm-to-customer. In other words, while traditional marketing tracks customer value primarily by capturing purchase activity, SMM can track customer value both directly (through purchases) and indirectly (through product referrals).
Shareable Content: Businesses can also convert the amplified interconnectedness of SMM into the creation of “sticky” content, the marketing term for attractive content that engages customers at first glance, gets them to purchase products, and then makes them want to share the content. This kind of word-of-mouth advertising not only reaches an otherwise inaccessible audience but also carries the implicit endorsement of someone the recipient knows and trusts—which makes the creation of shareable content one of the most important ways that social media marketing drives growth.
Earned Media: Social media marketing (SMM) is also the most efficient way for a business to reap the benefits of another kind of earned media (a term for brand exposure from any method other than paid advertising): customer-created product reviews and recommendations.
Viral Marketing: Another SMM strategy that relies on the audience to generate the message is viral marketing, a sales technique that attempts to trigger the rapid spread of word-of-mouth product information. Once a marketing message is shared with the general public far beyond the original target audience, it is considered viral—a very simple and inexpensive way to promote sales.
Customer Segmentation: Because customer segmentation is much more refined on social media marketing (SMM) than on traditional marketing channels, companies can ensure they focus their marketing resources on their exact target audiences.
Tracking Metrics
According to Sprout Social, the most important social media marketing (SMM) metrics to track are focused on the customer: engagement (likes, comments, shares, clicks); impressions (how many times a post shows up); reach/virality (how many unique views an SMM post has); share of voice (how far a brand reaches in the online sphere); referrals (how a user lands on a site); and conversions (when a user makes a purchase on a site). However, another very important metric is focused on the business: response rate/time (how often and how fast the business responds to customer messages).
When a business is trying to determine which metrics to track in the sea of data that social media generates, the rule is always to align each business goal to a relevant metric. If your business goal is to grow conversions from an SMM campaign by 15% within three months, then use a social media analytics tool that measures the effectiveness of your campaign against that specific target.
14 Best Social Media Tools
1) eclincher
Easy, affordable, and very useful – all things eclincher provides you to enhance your social media marketing. eclincher schedules social media posts, provides best-in-class analytics, does brand monitoring and so much more! When you use eclincher’s tools for your social media marketing (specifically Instagram and TikTok), be ready to experience an influx of traffic and, inevitably, a jump in Social Media ROI! It is the ultimate tool for sharing social media content with your audience!
2) Agorapulse
Similar to eclincher, Agorapulse also provides social analytics and manages all your social media interactions like comments, messages, and reviews in one place for all the social media apps. It also helps plan and construct your social media posts. All-in-all, a great alternative to eclincher.
3) Sprout Social
Sprout Social is also an extremely good tool, with numerous software awards in the past few years. They built their software and business service around five principles that they believe are key to enhancing any business’ social media marketing. These are listening, publishing, engagement, analytics, and advocacy – by using all these principles in conjunction with each other, they provide excellent service with very good results. This is a fantastic tool for marketing agencies to make things easy!
4) Sendible
If you want a tool that increases productivity and time management – this is the tool for you! Sendible specializes in helping you create posts in a fraction of the time you would normally do it. It also provides a very engaging collaborative experience between your team and clients – making communication just that much easier. The tool also constructs social media reports for you based on audience size, engagements, etc. It also helps to share content like social media images with your audience.
5) Hootsuite
Hootsuite is an excellent option if you have accounts on multiple social media networks. The tool manages all these accounts in one platform – making your social media production and marketing much more efficient. Like eclincher, the tool also has a content calendar that lets you plan all your content ahead of time. It also has a trend analyzer. Lastly, it provides recommendations on when the best times to post are for maximum user engagement. It can be a very useful tool to search the social profiles of your customers & competitors!
6) Buffer
Buffer is basically a combination of Sendible and Hootsuite. The tool is great for social entrepreneurs and provides four major services:
- Insightful posting: Provides details on when and what you should post.
- Optimized posting: Buffer will give you some trending hashtags to ensure your content reaches the right viewers.
- Self-publish: The tool will post for you.
- Collaboration: Removes the need to have a micromanaged approach to team management.
7) Tailwind
Plan, create, schedule, and optimize are the four social media areas Tailwind can help you with. The tool gives post suggestions and helps you plan. It works with you when you create posts enhancing phrase structuring and photos. Many social media experts use this tool today! Tailwind automates social publishing and posts when they believe user engagement is at its peak.
8) MavSocial
MavSocial is basically a marketing team in one tool. The tool helps you schedule posts and makes managing engagement from multiple social media accounts easier with its single inbox. Additionally, like eclincher, MavSocial also provides industry trend analytics by tracking keywords and also constructing reports from your social media performance.
9) TweetDeck
Well, I guess it’s safe to say that you know on what platform TweetDeck operates – yes, Twitter! TweetDeck is a social media marketing tool that specializes in managing Twitter posts and accounts. The tool is directly integrated into Twitter’s interface and is really useful for enhancing user-generated content to be more engaging and reach a larger audience.
10) Crowdfire
Time management is what Crowdfire specializes in. The tool can save time by automatically searching for images and articles your audience will enjoy. It also allows you to create and post content much faster. Plus, it schedules posts to your social media calendar and automatically posts your content for you. Crowdfire also customizes each of your posts for every social media platform.
11) Foursixty
Foursixty is for all you business owners or marketing managers who want to spruce up your content design and quality. Foursixty’s tools make your social media accounts look more professional by optimizing and enhancing content quality. It also publishes directly to Instagram and helps you track influencers – to stay up to date with the latest trends.
12) Emplifi
Emplifi is a great overall business management tool. Apart from the social commerce cloud and service cloud, which makes your brand more shippable and increases customer service, respectively. It also has a great social marketing tool. With the help of AI, the tool can give you powerful insights and analytics on your potential and current audience. It is also a huge time saver – in one dashboard, you can manage your posting schedule, your overall content, and your community.
13) SOCi
SOCi is a platform that provides an extensive set of tools. I found these to be overwhelming initially, but after playing around for a couple of hours, I got the hang of it. The tool not only provides marketing services but also helps with customer relations and ad boosting. See this tool more as a “jack of all trades, master of none” kind of service provider.
14) Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is for those critical and knowledge-hungry analyzers. The tool serves more as your insight manager than a marketing tool. I was really impressed by the tools Buzzsumo has to offer. However, you can choose between five packages. Each has its own set of perks and cons. To stay pertinent to the topic, you would probably opt for the content creation package – which provides really basic tools apart from its excellent analytics.
Are Social Media Tools Worth It?
It depends on what stage of your business you are at. If you just opened a business, I would recommend waiting a bit more. Spending too much of your capital balance on marketing tools is very bad for your overall business prospect as you won’t have enough money to cover overheads, production costs, and potential expansion.
Instead, go for social media tools when you have built up your capital reserves and you are at a stage where you feel comfortable onboarding an addition to your marketing team. The social media tools will put your marketing in hyperdrive. You will see an exponential increase in engagement from your target audience.
Ultimately, your ROI will be sound, and you will see an increase in it – making a social media tool definitely worth it. However, choosing when to use it is crucial – sustainability is key!
The Bottom Line
Social media marketing (SMM) is the use of social media platforms to interact with customers to build brands, increase sales, and drive website traffic. As social media usage grows around the world, both via computer and mobile devices, the ability to drive sales from certain user populations is a growing business, rife with competition for views and clicks.
