What is Social Media Marketing SMM?
SMM means social media marketing. It is the essential part of digital marketing through which you can promote your products, services or brand on different social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, google+, Quora, YouTube, Twitter, and many more. Social media marketing is an entertaining and easy way of marketing.
If you are interested in marketing but you don’t want to do sales or another boring marketing kind of stuff. Then social media marketing is really good for you as you can spend your time on different social media platforms to understand what content is working, what posts you should create, what video is in trend, how you can create videos related to your brand, what are the trending features in social media and many more.
For Example – you are promoting a clothing brand, so Instagram and Facebook are the correct options through which you can promote your brand’s collection. You can create a Facebook page related to your brand and posts different images, offers, clothing videos, tie-dye videos, etc.
Business centres are using Facebook to promote their business and space.
Social media marketing is not only about the social site, but it also offers powerful marketing tools that can bring more traffic to your website. It is a method to improve or increase your online popularity. There are many social media marketing characteristics to achieve a good marketing strategy.
What are the characteristics of social media marketing?
1. You can participate – Before social media, we are not able to know much about the companies, businesses, products, services, brand value, customers reviews, company participation, and more. But because of social media, you can search anything about a brand, and you can share your reviews about the product you purchased. Social media platforms provide us with the opportunity to interact with our customers and tell them more about our business. Social media design a bridge between companies and audience so, they can understand each other. With all the new platforms of social media, audience and businesses are enjoying this process of participation.
2. Stay true and transparent – It is necessary for you to develop a trusty and transparent relationship with your customers in your social media strategy. Social media success demands loyalty, transparency and authenticity because your one negative or false comment can ruin your online honour.
Businesses using Facebook to promote their events and workshops
3. Build strong relationships – For a strong relationship with your customer, you must understand what he/her needs and how you can solve them. It is all possible when you have a sincere relationship with your customers. Like when your customer view your Facebook posts, Instagram updates, your Tweets reacted to his queries and YouTube videos. He trusts you and buys your product/service. Social media is a two-way interaction channel. It needs participation from both businesses and customers. Online conversation through different social media tools occurs in present time with real people. You get a chance to solve their questions because it is a great way to build a relationship with clients.
4. Reliability is important – Social media marketing is the way of marketing which provides you with the possibility to create your profile more reliable. All social media marketers must visit their sites regularly where their target audience is continuously watching them. You also can interact with new users, new customers and promote products. But you must talk, influence, and entertain your target audience on a regular basis.
What are the tools of social media marketing?
There are so many tools you can use to do social media marketing –
- Facebook – We all aware with the terms, advantages, and characteristics of Facebook and it is a platform where you can share a lot of things related to your products, services or brand. Facebook allows you to share serious, intelligent, and funny contents. Even you can go live, add a story and GIF on Facebook. But all you need to know – how to create content, how to share, how to promote your posts, and how to grow your Facebook audience. To learn all these tactics, you must to do a digital marketing course because only an expert can teach you the merits and demerits of social media marketing.
- Instagram – The one more tool of social media marketing and nowadays it is much popular than Facebook. Your audience may not answer your phone calls but, they respond to your Instagram post. Because your audience is using Instagram and you also can use this platform to influence them. Marketing on Instagram is a mixture of entertainment and promotion. But you must create that kind of content which is good enough to impress your audience. Now GIF and IGTV is very famous on Instagram but remembers always create content according to your website, products, services and business.
- LinkedIn – If you don’t know about LinkedIn then I will give a little brief about this platform. It is a channel where you can share content related to business – Like skills required for marketing, marketing goals, marketing tools, how to start a startup, trending news related to business and many more business-related things. LinkedIn is the platform where you can learn a lot of important things about business or marketing.
- Twitter – Now people using twitter to know daily updates and new trends. Big film stars, politicians, marketers, general people and everyone is on Twitter to share their ideas, views, and knowledge. You can share small messages, small GIF, and your business skills on Twitter to influence your customers.
How to use social media marketing?
You think it is simple to use social media marketing, but social media is not as easy as much as it looks. Here we mention some tips through which you can use social media marketing- but if you want to learn it properly, then you must do a certificate course.
1. Recognize your goals – It is a smart way to create your social media reputation. Decide your goals like what you want, who is your target audience, what is your product, how you will design your posts, what you will post on your Facebook or Instagram. Make a chart and write your goals but always remember your social media reputation is dependent on your posts.
2. Identify your audience – In every marketing, it is necessary to identify who is your target audience. Like if you are selling a mixer, your target audience will be ladies because your product is related to the kitchen and most of the time ladies are the queen of this zone. If you are selling shaving cream, you only talk to the male audience. Just like that on social media your product or service decide your target audience.
3. Choose the platform – There are various social media platforms but, every platform is not for your business. Like you cannot share a funny video of your office on LinkedIn because it is a business platform where no one takes you seriously if you share funny kind of stuff. But on Facebook or Instagram, you can share funny-intelligent quotes, posts, videos to entertain your audience. Choose the platform according to your product, service or the content you want to share with your audience.
Choose the platform according to the product like Instagram is a glamours platform where you can showcase your glamour side or product.
4. Continuously deliver relevant content – To entertain or engage your audience you need to create content daily in the form of video, blog, posts, podcasts, GIF, IGTV, micro-content, quotes, quiz and many more related to your work. Consistency is necessary to become a social media pro because once your audience starts liking your content, they want you to post or update more.
5. Grow your audience – Only social media profile is not enough you need to grow your audience as much as you can because without an audience your content is useless. You can do cross promotion to increase your audience – like share your Facebook posts in the related groups, share new offers, share your office view, products production photos, create groups, join groups, and many more.
What is the scope of social media marketing?
- Increasing popularity of social media – The popularity of social platforms is increasing year by year because everyone is using these platforms. The old age and the young generation everyone is taking the pleasure of Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter. For example – When your grandfather wants to listen to a song, they hear it on YouTube, not on radio or TV. When my mother wants to learn new recipes, she searches on YouTube and Google. Social media is the only platform where you can explore and learn anything. So, the popularity and scope of social media marketing are increasing day-by-day. You can choose social media marketing as your career.
- You can start your own – There are many options in social media marketing through which you can start your own business or marketing agency. Like – Facebook ad campaign, Instagram ad campaign, google ads, paid ads, or many more options. Everyone may don’t like 9 to 5 regular jobs so, they go for social media marketing option and work at home. You can learn how to start a Facebook ad campaign, how to use Instagram to promote your business?
- You can work as a freelancer – Your 9 to 5 regular job is not enough for you and you want to work or earn more. So, you can work as a freelancer and part-time worker in social media marketing. You can promote someone’s product or service on social sites. It is so simple – like you need to understand how to sell products on Facebook, which social media platform is ok for clothing products, business services, and you must know how to select social platforms according to the product or service.
- Companies need social media marketing – Now companies looking for employees who can promote their products or services by social media. Because social media platforms are not expensive, and it is convenient to use. Social media marketing is the way through which companies can share their business skills, business environment, skills you need to do business, products, services, product production videos, images, product reviews and many more things. That is the reason social media marketing is high in demand and the great tool of digital marketing.
- Changing nature of marketing – Social media is everywhere – Rural to Urban. Like if I want to see the new collection of Adidas so, I don’t need to go to their showroom it is available online. I can shop online, sell online, teach online, learn online and there are many more things we can do online. Now, most of the people purchase stuff online, and because of olx.com free ads, it is possible to sell your stuff online.
It is easy to learn and implement but, you must learn the strategies, tools and tactics of digital marketing. Social media marketing is the part of digital marketing, if you do a digital marketing course then, you will learn from masters. You can learn your own like from Google digital marketing course, Hubspot’s small certification online course, YouTube videos, social media marketing tutorials and can enrol for the online marketing course.
You are investing your time to learn something then it is necessary to learn from masters. Who can guide you the demerits and merits of marketing, how to use social media to do marketing, and much other valuable information?