Digital Marketing
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.
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.
Social media marketing requires both strategy and creativity.
While it may seem overwhelming, its importance cannot be overstated. It’s so important that 97% of marketers are using social media and 78% of salespeople outsell their peers by using social media for their business.
Plus, its benefits extend far beyond increasing sales.
However, not all businesses are aware of the benefits of social media marketing. In fact, 50% of small businesses aren’t using social media to promote their business. That’s an alarming number. Even more concerning is that an additional 25% don’t plan to use social media in the future either.
For those still on the fence, the benefits of social media marketing include:
- Growing your brand awareness: Social media marketing will make it easy to spread the word about your products and mission.
- Increasing your traffic: Using social media and linking it to your website will increase your traffic tremendously.
- Promoting your products and services: This is ultimately why you invest in marketing, right?
4 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.
2. Planning and Publishing
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.
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.
4. Analytics
Along the way, whether you are publishing content or engaging on social media, you will want to know how your social media marketing is performing. Are you reaching more people on social media than last month? How many positive mentions do you get a month? How many people used your brand’s hashtag on their social media posts?
Social media platforms are always evolving. When Facebook first started, people can only share text updates. Now, there are so many content formats such as images, videos, live videos, and Stories.
AP Media is an integrated marketing agency that provides solutions for social media marketing in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Cambodia, contact us should you need a more comprehensive guide on how to kickstart your own social media campaign!
