Fundamentals of Social Media Marketing

Table of Contents

What is Social Media?

Social: interacting with other people by sharing or receiving information with each other. Media: an instrument of communication. From these two separate terms, we can understand the basic definition of Social Media – a suite of online services that facilitates two-way communication and content sharing.

To understand social media, it is important to understand the features and functionalities that are common to most platforms. These include:

  • Profile creation: Users can create profiles that include personal information, photos, and other details.
  • Connecting with others: Users can connect with other users by following, friending, or liking them.
  • Sharing content: Users can share different types of content such as text, images, videos, and links.
  • Interaction: Users can interact with each other through comments, likes, shares, and direct messages.
  • Hashtags: Hashtags are used to categorize content and make it easier to find specific topics.

Social media has become an integral part of our lives, allowing us to connect with others, share our experiences, and stay informed about what’s happening in the world. Check out the Social Media Trends 2024.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing (SMM) is the use of social media platforms to promote a product, service, or brand. SMM includes developing a strategy, creating posts, monitoring mentions, responding to comments, and more. But it’s not just about creating business accounts and posting when you feel like it. Social media marketing requires an evolving strategy with measurable goals and includes:

  • Maintaining and optimizing your profiles.
  • Posting pictures, videos, stories, and live videos that represent your brand and attract a relevant audience.
  • Responding to comments, shares, and likes and monitoring your reputation.
  • Following and engaging with followers, customers, and influencers to build a community around your brand.
  • Social media marketing also includes paid social media advertising, where you can pay to have your business appear in front of large volumes of highly targeted users.

Understanding Social Media Marketing Funnel

Social media marketing funnel is the path your customers take on their journey with your business, from the first point a person becomes aware of your brand, through to potential purchase and beyond.

Like other areas of marketing and digital advertising, social media follows a similar pipeline concept. Experts and industry professionals may have slightly differing views on how many stages there are and what they should be called, but there is always an overarching basic framework in which they all follow, outlining the customers route from discovery to conversion and on to continued brand loyalty.

Social media marketing funnel consists of six possible stages. In this article, we will explore each one in turn – exploring what the customer is experiencing and discuss how you can adapt your social media activity to hit your audience at these crucial moments to produce the most engagement and ultimately move them further down the funnel to conversion.

The social media marketing funnel stages for the purpose of this analysis are:

  • Awareness – seeking to gain attention of those currently unaware of your brand or business.
  • Interest and Desire – sparking curiosity of those who have discovered you, presenting your product or service as desirable.
  • Consideration and Intent – making your product or service valuable and attainable to your customer so that they intend to purchase.
  • Conversion – The customer acts on intent and becomes a conversion through purchasing your product or service.
  • Loyalty – The customer has had a good social media driven shopping experience with you and will go on to purchase again.
  • Advocacy – The customer had such a good social media driven shopping experience, potentially multiple times, they become brand ambassadors and recommend your business to others.
Social Media Marketing Funnel

Social Media Marketing Strategy

A social media strategy is a plan that outlines your social media goals, the tactics used to achieve them and metrics tracked to measure performance. Your strategy doesn’t need to be complicated. What you want is a simple and specific plan with meaningful measurables. This will help you to identify the channels and tactics that are successful, versus those that fall flat. Ultimately, your social media strategy should drive brand awareness and engagement across social media channels for your target audience/s.

Social media strategy has tangible benefits like

  • A direction for all your social media activities
  • Improve brand awareness
  • Offer social customer service and support
  • Enhance targeting across audiences
  • Direct and increase website traffic
  • Personalize content
  • Generate better quality leads
  • Create social media influencer opportunities
  • Promote your unique content that could go viral
  • Offer social commerce and shoppable posts
  • Data you can analyze and measure

Steps to create a successful Social Media Strategy

  • Set goals/objectives for business: Choose a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant & Time Bound) goal/objective and then proceed further.
  • Audience Research: Choose the right Audience. To create personalized content, you need to understand who your audience is and what they want. The best way to achieve that is to conduct market research through online surveys, interviews with your customers or by setting up a focus group. Another way to find out more about your customers and community is to do social listening. Understand buyer personas which combine your buyer profile and buyer insights to create a picture of your ideal customer. Check out the detailed article on Audience Research.
  • Research your competitors: Competitor research is a crucial part of your social marketing strategy. It helps you understand what your competitors are doing in the social space such as what platforms they use and campaigns they run.
  • Choose Social Media Platforms that suits your goal/objective of strategy.
  • Plan, Create Engaging Content & Automate: Create good engaging content, create content calendar and schedule posts.
  • Monitor KPI’s and measure results
  • Improve your strategy based on results.

What is social media optimization?

Social media optimization is the process of improving your social posts (or your whole social media strategy) to achieve better results: faster follower growth, higher levels of engagement, more clicks or conversions, etc. To increase Traffic on your website using social media marketing.

Optimizing social media for business can involve many different techniques and tactics that vary in scope and complexity, such as:

  • Basic improvements on post level, e.g. asking an engaging question in a post caption or picking a more thumb-stopping visual
  • High-level improvements, e.g. redefining your brand’s tone of voice on social media
  • Optimizing Ad Campaigns, Budget Optimization

In any case, social media optimization should be based on performance analysis, audience and competitor research and/or insights gathered through social listening.

  • Think of SMO as an opportunity for you to analyze and adjust your online presence to make it perform even better.

Benefits of social media optimization

Here’s what the right social media optimization tactics can do for your social media efforts:

  • Grow your followers at a faster rate
  • Understand your audience on a deeper level
  • Increase brand awareness on social media
  • Improve reach on social media
  • Improve the quality of your leads from social media
  • Sell more of your products and services through social channels
  • Increase your engagement rate
  • Improve your ROAS
  • Improve your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAS) & Return on Investment (ROI)

Ways to implement Social Media Optimization

  • Social Media Search Optimization
    • Optimize your social media profiles, accounts and pages.
    • Do Market Research & Keyword Research to improve search rankings.
  • Follower Growth
    • Understand your audience.
    • Create content that focusses on their pain points.
    • Use Hashtags.
    • Use Awareness Ads.
    • Add Follow buttons of Social Media Platforms on your website.
  • Engagement on Social Media
    • Create content for your audience and post daily.
    • Prepare content calendar and schedule contents.
    • Try different types of contents and analyse engagement.
    • Using Page Insights and optimize your content marketing strategy.
    • Use Traffic and Engagement Ads Campaign.
    • Follow trends and create content using trending hashtags & audios.
  • Optimizing Contents
    • Try and test various types of Content
    • Identify Your Social Media Goals
    • Use Hashtags
    • Create Valuable Content That Solves Your Followers’ Problems
    • Use Multiple Images/Short Videos
    • Include Calls-to-Action
    • Use Attention-Grabbing Headlines/Captions
    • Use User Generated Content (UGC)
  • Better Conversions
    • Be consistent with your branding.
    • Add website/landing page links in profile/pages.
    • Make your website/landing page seamless and mobile friendly
    • Create and promote using product and service-related videos.
    • While creating ads, use compelling headlines, right call to action button.
    • Use A/B or Split Testing to improve your social media posts and ads campaign performance.
    • Use User Generated Content, reviews, feedback as a proof to build trust.
    • Social Listening must be part of your routine.
  • Improving ROAS & ROI
    • Target the right Audience.
    • Use Daily Budget in ads.
    • Analyse Ads Campaign and gradually increase your budget.
    • Use A/B or Split Testing to improve your social media posts and ads campaign performance.
    • Have a clear understanding of Bid Strategies, Ad Delivery or Performance Goals and Conversions.
  • Overall Performance
    • Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy with SMART objective & goals.
    • Target the right Audience.
    • Do Market Research and understand buyer’s persona.
    • Focus on more engagement than reach.
    • Use content marketing strategy to grow.

Organic vs Paid Social Media Marketing

We can split Social Media Marketing into two :

  • Organic Social Media Marketing – focuses on building a community and deepening relationships with consumers in an effort to induce interest and customer loyalty.
  • Paid Social Media Marketing – spending money on displaying advertisements or sponsored marketing messages on popular social media platforms and targeting a specific sub-audience.

Top 10 Social Media Platforms

  • Facebook: For building brand awareness and generating leads
  • Instagram: For visually showcasing your services and building a community
  • Twitter: For thought leadership, networking, and real-time engagement
  • LinkedIn: For professional networking and showcasing expertise
  • YouTube: For creating informative video content and tutorials
  • Quora: For sharing industry-specific knowledge and building credibility
  • Google My Business: For local visibility and customer reviews
  • Pinterest: For visual discovery and inspiration
  • WhatsApp: For personalized customer communication
  • Telegram: For personalized customer communication

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