What is social media marketing?

In addition to engaging with new and old customers, social media marketing (SMM) allows you to monitor your efforts.

Monitoring engagement levels across different areas of social media (listening and engagement), analysing reach and sales (analytics), targeting specific audiences (advertising). These three aspects are key in generating an effective social media marketing campaign. Social media management starts before this however with strategy, planning and publishing.

*statistics taken from Business Wire

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Why is Social Media so Effective?

As use of social media becomes more prevalent, the benefits across the marketing sector come down to three key points: connection, interaction, and data.

Connection

 Social media allows us to talk to customers in a way that was impossible three decades ago. We are now able to target a variety of audiences through different mediums on various platforms; video focused (YouTube), social (Facebook), or photo focused (Instagram). ‍

Interaction

 We split interaction into two groups: direct or passive. Direct communication includes direct messaging, tagging, or mentioning a business or product in a social media post, whereas passive communication includes following a page and liking posts.

One of the benefits of social media interaction is that it is public. People can see what others ‘like’ or ‘share’ and can interact with your business through others in their circle. 

Data

 Studying the data that comes from each post on social media can help you grow your campaign in the right direction. SMM tools can extract data and turn it into actionable analysis.

What are the Disadvantages?

There are so many advantages to social media marketing it is sometimes difficult to see that there could be disadvantages. However, the pace and reach that social media has can be damaging to any business if the content is negative.

Videos, posts, or photos claiming that products are harmful, that the company is unethical, or citing a bad customer service experience can all be damaging to a brand’s image. Even if a spokesperson sets the record straight, the negative content will remain indefinitely available, and the false content can continue to affect engagement.

The other disadvantage to social media marketing is due to the volume of information consumed by individuals. Some content may be attractive to customers at first glance but not engaging enough to convert to a sale. The aim with social media is to create what is called sticky content. This content will be engaging to new and existing customers and influence them enough to make a sale and to share the content.

Let’s walk you through each of the five pillars of social media management that will help you create sticky social media content.

1. Social Media Strategy

 This is the stage before you even put pen to paper, or press publish on any social media platform. The more targeted your strategy is, the more effective it will be. Take a step back and look at what you want to achieve. 

Here are some useful questions you might want to ask yourself:

What are your goals, and how can social media in particular help you achieve these goals?

Do you want to increase brand awareness or drive traffic to a particular page on your website?

Social media can increase engagement, create a community interested in your brand, products, and services but make sure to align your goals with clear business objectives. The numbers on social media platforms should also be translating into sales.

What is your current social media status?

 Take an audit of your presence on every platform you use. Look at what works well, and what could work better. Do you have a great Instagram account, but the website you’ve linked in your bio is letting you down? Or do you have an active TikTok account but nothing is translating to sales?

What platforms do you want to focus on?

 With so many social media platforms to choose from, when starting out you’ll want to focus on a few platforms that you think are most used by your target audience.

The largest social media platforms are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Snapchat. Messaging focused platforms are Whatsapp and Messenger, whilst there are smaller up-and-coming platforms such as Anchor, TikTok, and Tumblr. 

Below, we have broken down the six main social media platforms, showing the most common age range of users, and the main content shared on that platform. This should help narrow

• Facebook

1.9 billion active users daily. Age group: 25-35. Photos, videos, information.

• YouTube

315 million active users daily. Age group: 18-35. How-to, webinars, videos.

• Instagram

1 billion active users daily. Age group: 16-25. Inspiration, images, videos.

• Twitter

211 million active users daily. Age group: 24-34. News, discussion, humour, text.

• TikTok

1 billion active users monthly. Age group: 10-20. Short form videos, humour.

• Snapchat

306 million active users daily. Age group: 13-24. Trends, advertising, informal.

• LinkedIn

774 million active users. Aged 35-55. Professional, long text, value-focused. 

What content are you going to share?

 The type of content that you are going to share may impact the platforms that you choose to use as your main content outreach.

Your content can (and should) change as you learn more about the platform and your audience.

2. Planning and Publishing Across Social Media

The next pillar of social media management is planning and publishing.

Publishing is as simple as sharing a blog or posting an image or video online and with 3,000,000 people using social media there is no argument against social media being a great way to interact with current and future customers.

Use a social media calendar to plan when you are going to deliver your content, this should not only include dates but also times of day. Different platforms will be more active at specific times of the day therefore the time that you put out each post will massively impact your engagement. 

There are a variety of social media scheduling tools that can automatically publish your content for you, leaving you free to work on other aspects of the business.

3. Social Media Listening and Engagement

The more that you post on social media, the more your posts will be shared by others interested in your products and services. This will spark conversations about your brand and business. You will want to engage with as many people as possible to monitor the feedback you are getting. 

Being active on social media will allow you to share positive engagement as well as offer support or direction for negative comments.

While it might seem manageable to manually check notifications and respond to everyone initially, this will not be possible once your brand grows. Tools that combine all your social media messages and mentions will be the best way to listen to and engage with your customers.

It is also interesting to consider customer-to-customer engagement. People trust their friends so recommendations from other customers is one of the most effective ways to hit your sales targets. If your business offers customer referrals, you should definitely be tracking this purchase activity.

3. Social Media Listening and Engagement

 The more that you post on social media, the more your posts will be shared by others interested in your products and services. This will spark conversations about your brand and business. You will want to engage with as many people as possible to monitor the feedback you are getting.

Being active on social media will allow you to share positive engagement as well as offer support or direction for negative comments. 

While it might seem manageable to manually check notifications and respond to everyone initially, this will not be possible once your brand grows. Tools that combine all your social media messages and mentions will be the best way to listen to and engage with your customers.

It is also interesting to consider customer-to-customer engagement. People trust their friends so recommendations from other customers is one of the most effective ways to hit your sales targets. If your business offers customer referrals, you should definitely be tracking this purchase activity.

 4. Analytics and Reporting

 So, you’ve done all this work, but how do you know if it is going well? Do you have more customers than last month? Are more people sharing your posts? How many people engaged with your Instagram account specifically?

All social media platforms will have an ‘insights’ or ‘analytics’ section that can tell you basic information about engagement, but you will want to use a wider range of social media analytics tools to track across all platforms and get better insights. 

There are five analytics sections key to understanding how well your social media posts are doing:

-   Engagement. How many likes, comments, shares, or clicks has this post had?

-   Impressions. How many times has the post showed up?

-   Reach. How many unique views does your post have?

-   Referrals. How has each user ended up on your website or page?

-   Conversions. How many users have made a purchase?

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5. Advertising

 Advertising on social media will allow you to reach an audience wider than those who are following you. Modern advertising platforms will allow you to specify who you wish to advertise your product to, so you can target people who are predisposed to have an interest in your brand or services. This can be due to demographic, interest, ‘like’ history, and many other factors.

It is worth considering using a social media tool that can make changes to automatically optimise your advertising.

See how we grew Dartmoor Whisky Distillery’s sales using social media advertising.

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