What is Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Marketing is a part of digital marketing that uses social media platforms to promote or market their product, service or brand. Social Media Marketing demands creating and publishing content like posts, reels and advertising. It is used to engage audience, build brand awareness, have great online visibility and drive traffic on social media page or website. Social Media enables businesses or personal brands to interact with followers through stories and live.
Strategy for Social Media Marketing
1. Set your Goals
Define your measurable goals that what you want to achieve through social media marketing. Goals can be increasing brand visibility, getting likes, shares or comments, increasing followers, building community through organic reach. Moreover, it can be generating leads and getting sales or conversions through social media advertising.
2. Recognize your Target Audience
You have to define a specific audience you want to target to achieve your goals. Indeed, target audience can be researched by making buyer persona (demographics, behaviour and interest). We can identify their problems and desires so that it helps us to make content based on our target audience.
3. Choose a Social Media Platform
You have to choose a social media platform according to your target audience and needs.Therefore, different social media platforms have different mindset of audience. As we see, LinkedIn is used for professional networking, Instagram for high brand visibiity and lifestyle content, Facebook for good community building, paid advertising and other social media platforms.
4. Make a Content Planner
Create a calendar for timely publishing content and maintaining consistency. Whereas, defining content type like posts or reels, defining publishing frequency and defining posting time when our target audience is mostly active. It will create more efficiency in social media marketing. Therefore, it is one of the most important part of building social media marketing strategy.
5. Run Social Media Advertising
We can run paid advertising through different social media platforms. One of the most famous platform for social media marketing is Meta. It has the most broder reach and has a great audience segmentation to target specific audience. Hence, it is best for business for generating leads though eye-catching advertising with clear objective and call-to-action (CTA).
Advantages of Social Media Marketing
1. Global Reach
Moreover, through social media marketing you can achieve Global Reach. Indeed, it does not have any geographical boundaries as most of the people who use internet are on social media. Through social media, you can drive traffic or get sales or leads from any corner of the world.
2. Audience Segmentation
Moreover, each person has his or her own persona which is provided by social media platforms named as audience segmentation. We can target a specific audience according to us by creating a buyer person which contains demographics, behiavour and interest. We can also retarget audience.
3. Performance Tracking
Social Media platforms has the capability to show real-time performance with accuracy. You can monitor all the engagement on the advertisement or orgaic content. It will tell you the likes, shares, CTR, impressions, leads or conversion through analytics given by social media platforms.
4. Increases Brand Visibility
Social media has a global reach, hence we can get great brand visibility through social media marketing. Therefore working social media strategies will definitely get us a higher reach and leads or sales form the target audience.
5. Cost Efficient
Social Media Marketing is cost efficient then print ads and google ads, It is more flexible and easy to run advertising and generate sale or leads through target audience. You can set the budget according to your needs.
Disadvantages of Social Media Marketing
1. Negative Feedback
Social Media is a open source platform available for all. Mostly people relay on the consumers review. It may be great but it can affect the decision of the customers and will create problem in conversions.
2. Decline in Organic Reach
Business are not able to maintain their organic reach on social media and it causes decrease in the organic reach. If we skip a week only, algorithm gets a bad signal for the page and then it may have difficulty to pick up the post or reel.
3. Extremely Competitive
In this era, social media is very competitive as more then 25 people out of 100 create content in the world. It is very difficult to get a great online visibility. You always have to be consistent with high quality content.
4. Spam and Fake Accounts
Spam and Fake Accounts harm the businesses and have to deal with inappropriate comments and wrong reviews as it affects the brand reputation.
5. Algorithm Updates
Algorithm updates highly affect the reach on social media as it may be in negative or positive. Positive impacts can take their place but an negative impact due to update can give a bad effect on social media reach and online visibility.
Conclusion
Lastly, social media marketing is the best way in this era to generate leads and sales, drive traffic and increase online visibility. Indeed, strategy is must important thing to grow through social media marketing. Therefore, targeting a specific audience on a single social media platform and creating high-quality content consistently. As social media has global reach, real-time performance tracking, audience segmentation and cost efficient but is also extremely competitive and can create a negative impact online. Social Media Marketing has both, advantages and disadvantages but it is concluded that using social media marketing as a business or personal brand with great strategy can help you grow faster and beat competition.
