What Is Social Media Marketing? Guide for Businesses in 2024

Social media marketing is a way to use social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to tell people about your business and its products or services. Keep reading to learn more about what social media marketing is, how it can help your business, how to make your own social media marketing plan, and more!

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is using social media to let people know about your company and what you sell. It's like making a poster and putting it up on a wall, but instead of a wall, you use social media websites. You can make your own pictures and words to share, talk to people who see them, pay money to make more people see them, and see how many people like them.

Using social media for marketing, whether on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, or another platform, is one of the most powerful ways to engage and interact with your audience on multiple levels, building your brand awareness and interest to drive leads and sales. This guide serves as your partner for learning the definition of social media marketing and getting started with your campaign.

Benefits of Social Media Marketing

Now that you understand what social media marketing is, let's explore the advantages of using social media for your business.

Social media marketing can bring many benefits to businesses, including:

• Connect with people: Social media lets your business talk to customers right away through comments and messages. This helps you get your brand known, make people trust you, and keep customers coming back.
• Learn more about your customers: Social media gives your business extra info about your customers. Look at this info to see what people like, when to post new things, and more.
• Help people buy from you: Social media can also help your business get more customers. Use posts, comments, ads, and more to move people from just hearing about your brand to wanting to buy from you.
• Get more people to visit your website: Your social media pages, posts, and ads can all have links to your website. This lets more people find your website and see what you have to offer.

How Does Social Media Marketing Work?

We have discussed what social media marketing is and why it is beneficial, but how does it actually work?

The easiest way to understand how social media marketing works is to break it down into five main parts: which are:

1. Strategy
2. Planning and publishing
3. Listening and engagement
4. Analytics and reporting
5. Advertising

Let’s explore each one!

1. Strategy

The first thing you need to do when marketing your brand on social media is to figure out what you want to do. You need to think about what you hope to get out of your social media campaign, which social media platforms you want to use, and what kind of things you want to post.

We'll tell you more about how to create a social media strategy for your business below!

2. Planning and Publishing

Planning and publishing content is important for a successful social media marketing campaign. To make sure your content reaches your audience, you need to plan your posts ahead of time.

There are many social media tools that can help you plan and publish content easily, such as Hootsuite and Buffer.

3. Listening and Engagement

Social media is a great way to connect with your customers and build strong relationships that can make them loyal to your brand. However, this can only happen if you pay attention to what your customers are saying and interact with them.

To listen and engage with your customers, you should follow what people are saying about your brand on social media and respond to their comments in a positive and engaging way.

4. Analytics and Reporting

To make your social media campaign successful, you need to keep improving your strategies. To do this, you need to know which content and strategies work best for your company.

This is where analytics and reporting come in. Many social media platforms give you access to audience analytics so you can easily see who views your content, along with many more important metrics, like when your audience is most active on the platform.

By using the right reporting strategy, you can learn what tactics and content help your company achieve its goals. You can then optimize those strategies to get even better results in the future.

5. Advertising

If you have extra money for marketing, you should think about using social media ads. Social media ads are a great way to show your products and services to more people.

Most social media platforms let you choose who sees your ads. This means you can make sure your ads reach the people who are most likely to buy your products or services.

The Best Social Media Marketing Platforms for Businesses

Now that you know more about social media and how it can help your company, let's see which platforms you can use to promote your brand.

Here are some of the best social media platforms for businesses:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• TikTok

Let’s dive into each one in more detail below!

Facebook

When it comes to marketing on social networks, Facebook is a top choice for many businesses. With more than 2.9 billion monthly active users, Facebook is one of the most popular social media platforms in the world. Facebook is also a great platform if you want to reach baby boomers and millennials, with 87% of millennials and 84% of baby boomers on Facebook. Many users utilize Facebook to get updates from their favorite brands, making it the perfect platform to announce events, updates to your business hours, or your newest products or services.

Instagram

Surpassing over one billion active monthly users, Instagram is another popular social media platform for promoting your products or services. Instagram features a variety of content formats, including Stories, Reels, Lives, Feed posts, and more, making it a great platform for creating different types of engaging content for your audience. Plus, Instagram is one of the best platforms for influencer marketing since many people flock to the platform to follow their favorite influencers.

X (formerly Twitter)

People love to use Twitter to get the latest news, follow brands, contact companies for customer support, participate in energized discussions, and more. Twitter is the perfect platform to allow your audience to contact you for customer support and engage with users in fun discussions.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a professional network that people use to search for and promote jobs, share industry insights, and learn more about a company’s culture and work environment. That makes LinkedIn a great platform to:

• Attract new team members
• Network with businesses, partners, and customers
• Share company news and updates
• And more

TikTok

One of the fastest-growing social media sites, TikTok is one platform you won’t want to miss out on. TikTok enables you to post fun, short-form videos that engage and entertain your audience while they learn more about your brand. Due to its constant video challenges and trends, TikTok is an excellent platform for growing your brand awareness and reaching a younger audience demographic.

How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy

Now that you know more about social media and how it can help your company, let's see which platforms you can use to promote your brand.

Here are some of the best social media platforms for businesses:

1. Identify your target audience
2. Identify your platforms
3. Set your goals
4. Determine how you want to convey your brand
5. Identify the metrics you want to track

1. Identify your target audience

When you start learning social media marketing, one of the first things you need to do is figure out who you want to reach. If you don't target the right people, your marketing won't work. So, you need to find out who is most interested in your business.

To figure out who your target audience is, think about the people who usually buy from you. What do you know about them? For example:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Occupation
• Income
• Hobbies
• Interests

You can use this information to understand who you are trying to reach on social media. You can also use it to figure out which social media platforms are best for your business. Focus on the platforms where your target audience is most likely to be.

For example, if you sell workforce management software to manufacturing and mining companies, you can create personas based on these industries. Then, you can focus your social media messages and platforms on these prospects.

2. Identify your platforms

After you figure out who you want to reach, the next step is to find the best social media platforms for them. Choose platforms where your audience spends their time online. There are many options, such as:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• Pinterest
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Snapchat
• TikTok

3. Set your goals

Before you start using social media to market your business, you should decide what you want to accomplish with your social media strategy. What do you hope to achieve through social media?

There are many goals you can choose from, including:

• Increase brand recognition
• Increase engagement
• Increase leads
• Increase sales

Without a plan, your social media posts will be all over the place. Goals help you stay on track with your social content so you can get things done.

4. Determine how you want to convey your brand

One of the biggest benefits of social media is that it enables you to convey your brand’s personality through posts. Before you launch your first post, you need to determine your brand identity. You want to determine how you’ll convey your brand to your audience. Do you want to take a fun-loving and casual approach like Target? What about a comical and quirky approach like Dollar Shave Club? That’s what you need to figure out with your social media identity. You need to determine your brand’s personality and how you want to convey that personality to your audience.

5. Identify the metrics you want to track

When you use social media to promote your brand, it's important to track how well your campaigns are doing. This helps you see how your content is working and make changes to improve your results.

To track your campaigns, you need to choose a few key performance indicators (KPIs). The specific KPIs you choose will depend on what you want to achieve with your campaigns, but some common ones include:

• Engagement Rate
• Website traffic
• Brand awareness
• Post reach
• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Bounce rate
• Conversions

Get Professional Help with Social Media Marketing

Now that you know the answer to the question, “What is social media marketing,” you can get started with your strategy! Need help getting started? Not sure if your business will benefit from social media? Get in touch with our social media specialists! We can have a chat about your unique business and goals and discuss how social media could fit into your existing strategy, along with how it can help you achieve your goals. Contact us online or call us at 07052690848  to get started!