What is Social Media Marketing (SMM)?
Social media marketing (SMM) is about meeting your customers and audience with the use of platforms where they build their social network and share information and socially interact. Social Media marketing (SMM) is important and powerful because of it’s unparalleled capacity in three main marketing domains; Connection, Interaction and customer data.
Social Media changed not only the way we connect, but also how the businesses change customer behavior by creating content and keeping the customers engaged by extracting demographic, geographic and personal data used for targeting the audiences.
Social media marketing is a way to do inbound marketing helping us to attract more partners and customers and build brand awareness by customer engagement, creating conversation about our business and word of mouth.
The main objectives of Social Media Marketing (SMM)
- Brand awareness
- Increase community size
- Improve the relationship with the audiences
- Target the accurate audiences
- Convert followers to customers and generate leads
- Increase customer satisfaction and brand loyalty
- Learn from the competitors
Social Media Marketing core activities are;
- Set Strategy
- Planning and publishing
- Engagement
- Advertising
- Analytics
Set Strategy;
Social media strategy is steps and the procedure for reaching the marketing objectives in the social media.
- Create the persona
- Identify the social media platforms
- Market and competitor’s study
- Identify the important KPIs
Social Media paltforms;
One of the main steps of our strategy is identifying our target social platforms.
With 1.9 billion daily active users, Facebook is the largest and the most established platform.
We should choose the platform based on our requirements, our industry and the type of audiences we expect;
Platform | No. of Users | Audience | Industry Impact | Best for |
1.9 billion daily active users worldwide | An even spread of Generation X and Millennials | B2C | Brand awareness; advertising | |
1 billion monthly active users | Primarily Millennials | B2C | High-quality images and videos; user-generated content; advertising | |
TikTok | 1 billion active monthly global users | Primarily Gen Z followed by Millennials | B2B and B2C | Short-form, creative video content; user-generated content; brand awareness |
211 million daily active users worldwide | Primarily Millennials | B2B and B2C | Public relations; customer service; community building | |
774 million active users worldwide | Baby boomers, Generation X, and Millennials | B2B | B2B relationships, business development, and social selling | |
YouTube | Over 315 million daily active users worldwide | Primarily Millennials but has a strong audience across gender and age demographics | B2C and B2B | Brand awareness; long-form entertainment, and how-to videos |
444 million monthly active users worldwide | Primarily Millennials with a solid audience in Gen Z, Gen X and Baby Boomers | B2C | Visual advertising; inspiration |
Setting KPIs;
In order to measure the success of our social media marketing, we need the measurable metrics that can show our performance on each platform. KPIs help us to achieve our SMART marketing goals.
The most common Social Media Marketing KPIs are;
- Reach
- Engagement
- Impression
- Conversion rate
- Follower count
- Shares and reposts
- Audience growth rate
- Profile visits
- Bounce rate
To increase brand awareness and the number of our followers, we should focus on KPIs like reach, audience growth rate and impression and if building the trust is our concern, we should concentrate on saves, likes and comments.
Planning and publishing;
We should plan for the content and the frequency of publishing of the contents. The quality of the content is so important that it is preferred to publish less content with high quality than everyday publishing but with low quality! There are social media management solution tools specialized for creating content, pictures, videos and captions and also for scheduling and monitoring the posts and all of the interactions. By using these tools, we can make sure that our posts are set as planned.
Engagement;
Customer engagement increases the chance of knowing the customers and their requirements and building a relationship with them, thru their questions and reviews and comments. Being responsive and making the customers confident of our service will lead to brand loyalty and sales increase. Here are some tips to increase customer engagement on Social Media;
- Monitor and analyse the metrics
- Post quality content
- Answer all of the comments, reviews and questions
- Encourage users to share and like
- Get more followers
- Use videos and images
- Get the users engaged by contents and questions
- Follow relevant people in your industry
- Find the most suitable time for posting based on users’ active hours
- Cross promote your different profiles on social media
Advertisement;
Advertising on social media uses data from different sources to deliver paid ads to targeted audiences on social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. The ads are personalized based on the behaviour of the users. Social media ads are effective, quick, cost-effective with high rate of return.
Different types of ads on social media are;
- Image ads
- Video Ads
- Stories Ads
- Carousel Ads
- Collection Ads
- Text Ads
Analytics;
Social Media metrics can be measured by the analytical tools built in each platform such as;
- Instagram Insights
- Facebook Analytics
- Twitter Analytics
- And also Google analytics which is a powerful tool to measure our performance on different platforms.
Conclusion;
The increasing demand of the customers on online platforms confirms that Social medias are not only for socializing and they have become popular platforms for product search. So it has become a necessity for the businesses to be present on social media and have social media strategy, especially that it increases exposure and customer base, reduces marketing expenses and creates brand loyalty.
