Information in this blog post was obtained from the Sprout Social, HubSpot Blog, and Moz.com.
Social media is a virtual community and online platform for people to create, share and exchange opinions, views, and experiences. The most significant difference from general social mass media is that it allows users to enjoy more choice and editing power, and to assemble themselves into some kind of reading and listening community. At this stage, social media mainly includes forum communities, social networking sites, blogs, microblogs, location check-ins, Q&A, and other types.
In recent years, social media has flourished on the fertile ground of the Internet and exploded with dazzling energy. The information it spreads has become an important part of people's browsing on the Internet, not only creating one hot topic after another in people's social lives but also making social media marketing come into being.[1] Companies can use social media to listen to users' voices, promote their products and influence customers in a subtle way. So, what are the characteristics of social media marketing and what advantages does it have compared to other marketing methods? We can approach social media marketing in a variety of ways from Social Media Explorer, Scott Monty and others.[2]
Features of Social Media Marketing
1. Compared with other online marketing such as search engines and email, social media marketing has a trust-based communication mechanism and active participation of users, which can better influence the consumption decisions of Internet users.
2. Sharing information and discussing issues among people, through constant interaction can effectively reach a consensus on a certain topic, providing a lot of opportunities for brands to be spread and amplified.
3. Social media users have high stickiness and stability, and clear positioning, which can provide brands with more segmented target groups.
4. Based on the fertile ground of the Internet, the market for social media marketing is still expanding and has become not just a place for friends to share, but a new business competition model.
The Advantages of Social Media Marketing
Social media has a considerable amount of traffic to meet the different marketing strategies of enterprises
As a continuous innovation and development of the marketing model, more and more companies try to play on SNS sites, whether to carry out a variety of online activities, product placement, or market research, and viral marketing, can be achieved here, the biggest feature of SNS is to fully demonstrate the interaction between people, and this is precisely the basis of all marketing.
Can effectively reduce the marketing costs of enterprises to obtain a high rate of return
Many companies invest a lot of money in advertising every year, but the return rate is very low. Social network marketing "many-to-many" mode of information delivery has a stronger interactive, by more people's attention. With the increasing maturity of Internet users' online behavior, users are more willing to take the initiative to obtain information and share information, community users show a high degree of participation, sharing and interactivity, the main medium of social network marketing communication is the user, the main way is the word of mouth among users. Therefore, compared with traditional forms of advertising, there is no need to invest a lot in advertising. On the contrary, due to the characteristics of user participation, sharing and interactivity, it is easy to deepen the user's knowledge of a brand and product, and it is easy to form a good impression and form a good communication effect from the analysis of media value.
Precise marketing for target users through targeted advertising
Social media user registration data are relatively real, enterprises in the development of social network marketing, through the user's scenario, income status, natural attributes and other tags to screen suitable for their own users, so targeted publicity and interaction with these users to achieve accurate marketing. If a company has limited funds for marketing, but wants to get a better result, it can only target some regions for marketing, or advertise according to the user's location, gender, age, interests and other tags, so as to achieve precise marketing of target users.
As a marketing method that meets the needs of online users, can bring more sales
Since community content sharing is more like sharing among friends, it makes users more receptive to information. Whether it's a diary of a friend, a recommended video, participation in an event, or a friend's new acquaintance, people will be the first to know and pay attention to what their friends are doing and share their feelings with them. Participation, sharing, and interaction, it represents the characteristics of network users, but also in line with the new trend of network marketing development, and the rapid development of social network marketing model is precisely in line with this characteristic of network users. No media can pull the relationship between people so closely, the use of different types of advertising with the continuous stimulation of the user's desire to buy, diversified forms of concessions also bring considerable fission effect for product sales. Therefore, in line with the needs of network users marketing model to help companies get a greater role in online marketing.
Make the enterprise interactive PR more timely, easy to build brand goodwill
Users in social media to get information while also sharing information, companies can be the first to understand the attitude of users through social media and make interaction. In addition, social media as the first voice channel, when a company has a problem, it can timely PR, enhance the reliance of users, and build trust with users while enhancing the goodwill of the brand.
5 Steps of Social Media Marketing Strategy
1. Research your buyer personas and audiences
To develop a social media marketing strategy, the first thing you need to determine is, who the target users of the marketing are, and after that, further determine their needs and interests. To do this, think about the kind of people you are trying to reach, why you are trying to reach them, and how to categorize them as a group in the abstract.
2. Determine which social platforms you will be marketing on
There are differences in the tone of each social media outlet, and as a social media marketer, it is critical to determine which platforms you will be marketing on. There is no absolutely right answer as to which social channels you should use for marketing, it depends more on what the needs and interests of your target users are, and where and how long they are active.
3. Create unique and compelling content
Not only is your content presented in social media, but your competitors' content is also there, so if you want to stand out, you need to have social media content that will attract the attention of your target users. To create compelling content, on one hand, you need to use your own creativity to create content, and on the other hand, you need to study your competitors' content, how they do it, and find a breakthrough and differentiation to promote your product in a unique way. UGC can also be used to help produce content. For example, you can select content that your target customers have posted to form a collection and republish it, which can also increase the engagement of your target customers, and later encourage them to share their experience using thematic hashtags and build a relationship with the product.
4. Organize social media content scheduling
Social media marketing is intertwined, and each phase has its own goals. To achieve these goals, social media content needs to be planned and scheduled so that the continuity of content is more effective in creating a scale effect and spreading the brand.
How do you determine the frequency of posting content on social media? As a rule of thumb, you should only post on social media when you have high-quality content to share. If you want to do a good job of scheduling, you need to make sure that this high-quality content can be produced on schedule, which requires a good distribution of tasks and good coordination of content.
Also, there should be a good balance in terms of posting frequency, because if you post content too infrequently, it will be easily forgotten by your followers, while if the content is posted too often, it may annoy your followers, both situations may lead to loss of followers and decrease in engagement, so you need to test and verify and analyze the effect under various frequencies through data.
5. Analyze your impact and results
The effectiveness of social media marketing needs to be verified by analyzing data. Companies need to track all content on each social channel and look at each key metric, which may include the number of followers, likes, likes, shares and all other interactions on each platform, etc.
Analyzing the data allows you to identify gaps in your marketing, identify new goals and reach them. For example, if the number of interactions is not enough, then you can increase the number of interactions with followers by talking to them, answering their questions, liking their posts, encouraging them to participate in UGC, adding hashtags and sharing content about the brand, etc. to engage with them more frequently.
For more information about Social Media, please go read my colleague Kaitlyn's post here.
Resources
[1] DragonSearch. (2010, August 16). Social Media Patterns. Retrieved from https://moz.com/blog/social-media-patterns
[2] Scott, R. (2022, September 23). How to Learn Social Media Marketing: 39 Resources for Beginners. Retrieved from https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/social-media-marketing-resources
[3] Kenan, J. (2022, September 22). Social media marketing: What it is and how to build your strategy. Retrieved from https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-marketing-strategy/
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