SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING- THEN AND NOW

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING- THEN AND NOW

Social media marketing, one of the most important pillars of digital marketing, has changed drastically over the last 15 years, majorly because technology has exploded during that same time frame.When you go back to 2001, you never thought about sticking yourself to your smartphone and you certainly weren’t binge-watching several seasons and series of your favorite show on Netflix. Just to keep things in context since a lot can change in 15 years—especially in terms of technological shifts, —2001 was the year that introduced iTunes and the first-generation iPod to the crowd.In this blog, let us understand why social media marketing is critically necessary for today’s era.Benefits of social media by marketers-Marketing through social media is one of the most efficient, versatile, and pocket-friendly strategies that small brands and businesses can use to target their potential audience and raise sales over time. That's the main reason why 97% of marketers are helping social media to target their audiences.Social media marketing is the necessity of social media channels and platforms to connect with your target audience to develop your brand, enhance sales, and lead website traffic. This includes publishing and posting great, creative and innovative content on your social media channels, profiles, understanding and engaging your followers, analysing your outcomes, and running social media ads.At this pace of time, the most efficient and important social media channels and platforms are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat.There is also a huge pace of social media management tools and techniques that guide brands and businesses to get the best out of the social media platforms mentioned above. For example, Buffer is a source of social media management strategy and tools, which can help you gain enormous success with your social media marketing. Whether you expect to develop a brand or boost your business, we give our fullest to help you succeed

A Brief Overview of Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is mainly linked with posting and publishing. Businesses and brands were sharing and acknowledging their content on social media to create remote traffic to their websites and, ultimately, sales. But social media has grown up far beyond being just a place and section to broadcast content.Nowadays, businesses are benefited from social media in a myriad of varied ways. For example, a business that is worried about what people are talking about its brand would manage social media conversations and respond to relevant and space-defining mentions (social media listening and engagement). A brand or business that requires to be aware of how it’s performing on social media would understand its reach, involvement, and sales on social media with an analytics tool and technique (social media analytics). Companies and businesses that desire to target and reach a specific set of potential customers and audiences at scale would run highly targeted social media advertisements.

The Five Core Pillars of Social Media Marketing

1. Strategy

Before you move into the core and publish and post something on social media, let’s think over the deeper side and analyze the bigger picture. The initial phase is to ponder about your social media strategy.What are your objectives? How can social media ensure that you achieve your brand’s objective? Few brands and businesses help social media for upgrading their brand awareness, others utilize it for handling website traffic and sales. Social media can also benefit you to initiate involvement around your brand, develop a community, and serve as a customer support platform and channel for your potential customers.Which social media channels do you want to target? The most important social media channels and platforms, stated above, are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat. There are also upcoming and fresh small platforms, such as Tumblr, Tik Tok, and Anchor, and social messaging channels, such as Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat. When they were initiated, it’s necessary to pick some fresh channels and platforms that you think your potential customers and audience is on than to be on all channels and platforms.What kind of content do you desire to share? What kind of content will attract and engage your target audience and potential consumers best? Can this happen with images, videos, or links? Is it done by educational or entertaining content? A better place to initiate this is to develop a marketing persona, which will make you answer these questions easily. And this doesn’t need to be the same every time; you can always modify your strategy according to how your social media posts take place.To help you develop a good social media strategy, here are our long-form, step-by-step actions on making a social media strategy and social media marketing practice and plan.

2. Planning and Publishing

Social media marketing for new, fresh and small brands usually initiates with having a consistent and relevant existence on social media. Nearly three billion people (3,000,000,000!) utilize social media. By making your presence on social media channels and platforms, you provide your business an opportunity to be discovered by your future customers.Publishing and posting to social media are as easy as sharing and publishing a blog post, an image, or a video on a social media channel. But you will require a perfect plan for your content to be ahead of time instead of making and publishing content spontaneously. Also, to make sure that you are boosting your reach on social media, you should publish and post good content that your potential audience likes, at the correct timing and frequency.

3. Listening and Engagement

As your business and social media following rising, conversations about your business and brand will also rise. The audience will comment and mark on your social media posts, tag your brand in their posts, or message them directly.The target audience might even speak about your brand and business on social media without making you aware of it. So, you will want to manage and monitor social media conversations about your business and brand. If it’s a positive comment, you gain an opportunity and a chance to surprise and delight them. Otherwise, you can give them support and make a situation in control before it gets worse.You can manually monitor all your notifications and updates across all the social media channels and platforms but this isn’t sufficient and you won’t observe posts that didn’t tag and mention your businesses and brand’s social media profile. You can instead utilize a social media listening and engagement technique and tool that initiate all your social media mentions, descriptions, and messages, including posts that didn’t tag your brands and business’s social media profile.

4. Analytics

Along the journey, whether you are posting and publishing content or involving on social media, you will need to understand how your social media marketing is publishing. Are you targeting more potential audiences on social media than the previous month? How many positive descriptions and mentions do you receive in a month? How many potential audiences had used and tried your brand’s hashtag on their social media posts?The social media platforms and channels themselves give a basic range of data and information. To get more in-depth and detailed analytics information, data or to easily compare across different social media channels and platforms, you can utilize the huge parameter of social media analytics tools and techniques available, such as Buffer Analyze

5. Advertising

When you gain more funds and economic support to raise your social media marketing, an area or space that you can describe is social media advertising. Social media ads help you to target a bigger target audience than those who are following you.Social media advertising channels and platforms are so necessary and powerful nowadays that you can precisely describe exactly who to showcase your ads to. You can develop target audiences depending on their demographics, interests, behaviours, and many more.When you are activating several social media advertising campaigns at once, you can consider using a social media advertising technique and tool to make bulk changes, automate processes, and optimize and monitor your ads.

Expensive or inexpensive-Social media marketing depicts an amazing weapon for boosting brand exposure. At the same tenure, social media give brands an efficient opportunity to bolster customer service and various other facets of brands and business. Most necessarily, when social media marketing is held properly, it’s a comparatively inexpensive method for brands and businesses to engage consumers.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING THEN AND NOW - CONCLUSION

At last, we can conclude by saying that the most efficient way to make sure success is to ponder carefully before you post or publish, and constantly evaluate and understand what you are posting and all your online activities.  You are unwilling to have time to dedicate and devote to all the following networks -- and whatever comes next -- so you should decide and choose the ones that make the best sense to you, your subject areas, and your schedule.