Social Media Marketing is a form of digital marketing that uses social media platforms to advertise and sell products, build customer relationship, and create brand awareness. Social Media platforms allow followers to share content with their social network, interact with one another and build relationships and communities online. By sharing the content, the user’s connections are able to see the content, therefore reaching more people.
Social media marketing is the easiest way to reach an enormous audience. There are 4.1 billion social media users worldwide in October 2020, equating to 53 percent of the total global population.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing for Enterprises
Increase brand awareness
Generate leads
Increase website traffic
Increase sales
Faster and easier content distribution
Improving brand loyalty
Interaction with the target audience
Global Reach and Visibility
Cost effective
Facebook : Facebook is the biggest social network in the world, with 2.5 billion active users focusing on interaction with friends and family. Facebook pages allow a product to provide videos, photos, longer descriptions, and testimonials where followers can comment on the product pages for others to see. Facebook marketing is extremely effective, great for customer interaction and word-of-mouth marketing. There are different marketing possibilities on Facebook:
Facebook Pages : Are free marketing tools for businesses. Facebook Pages let you identify your business. Facebook Pages look similar to personal profiles but offer a variety of different marketing options only applicable to businesses, organizations, and causes. For example, they can have reviews, list an address, include chat options, a call-to-action buttons etc.
Facebook Advertising : Ads give you access to a much larger audience. Facebook has one of the best-targeted advertising programs. Facebook Ads are the most popular because they’re simple, flexible, and impactful. You can create ads targeted at specific geographic areas, ages, education levels, interests etc. They appear in the side columns of the Facebook site. They include a headline with copy, an image, and a click-through link to either a Facebook page, a Facebook app, or an outside website.
Facebook Shopping: Facebook Shops are marketplaces on your Facebook page and your Instagram account. Facebook Shops gives small businesses the same tools to build and operate your online store that global brands have had for reaching their customers.
Instagram : Powerful platform for marketers to reach their customers and prospects.
It allows you to share your products through multimedia posts. Instagram users are more engaged than the average social media user. People enjoy being connected with brands, actively interacts with them and wants to buy from them, is a big advantage of Instagram marketing. With Instagram shop, businesses can create product catalogs, craft collections, and curate products into themes that tell their brand story.
- Influencer marketing : Instagram has become the best platform for influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is promoting your products, services, or brands by collaborating or partnering with an influencer. Rather than businesses selling directly to consumers, they are building relationships with influencers who can sell for them. Influencer marketing allows brands to reach their target audience.
Twitter :Social media and online news platform where people communicate in short messages – up to 240 characters long – known as tweets. Twitter allows companies to promote their products in short messages which appear on followers. With more than 380 million users, it is one of the most important social media platforms to be active on for businesses. Twitter Ads campaigns help you reach your marketing goals. When you use them, you have the option to find your real, potential customers by locating Twitter users who share similar interests. From hashtags and pinned tweets to Twitter lists and social media influencers, there’s a lot to Twitter. Promoted Tweets: These ads are just like regular tweets, and they appear in a user’s Twitter feed along with posts from people the user follows. There are different advertising options on twitter. All of the ads are labeled as “Promoted” so users can distinguish them from other content on their feeds.
Promoted Tweets : Promoted Tweets are ordinary Tweets purchased by advertisers who want to reach a wider group of users or spark engagement from their existing followers. All Promoted Tweets are clearly labeled as “Promoted” when an advertiser is paying for their placement on Twitter. Promoted Tweets are a good option for advertisers to increase engagement and expand their reach to a wider group of users beyond their follower base.
Promoted Accounts : They are designed to help brands become more discoverable and grow their number of followers. Promoted Accounts suggest Twitter accounts that people don’t currently follow and may find interesting. Promoted Accounts are displayed in in multiple locations across Twitter, including your timeline, “Who to follow” section, and search results.
Promoted Trends : Promoted Trends appear in the first or second slots of the “Trends for you” section in the Explore tab and “What’s Happening” module on Twitter.com. These ads look exactly like other trending topics, and users can interact with them in the same ways. When someone clicks on a Promoted Trend, they’ll see a Tweet from your brand at the top of the search results, followed by authentic Tweets directly from the conversation surrounding the trend. Promoted Trends are great for complementing the launch of something new or the promotion of a big event at scale. Promoted Trends also benefit brands looking to connect with what’s happening by maximizing discovery, building relevance, and securing adjacency to what you know will be trending that day — such as a cultural event, sporting event, holiday, national (topic here) day, or industry news.
LinkedIn: LinkedIn, a professional business-related networking site, allows individuals and businesses to create professional profiles for themselves as well as their business to network and meet others. Linkedin is a very powerful platform for business to improve brand awareness, build your network, boost leads and conversions and increase revenue.
Sponsored Content ads : Sponsored Content appears directly in the LinkedIn feed of professions you want to reach, and comes in three different formats: single image ads, video ads, and carousel ads. Using Sponsored Content, you can: Target your most valuable audiences using accurate, profile-based first-party data.
Text Ads : LinkedIn Text Ads are intuitive, self-service ad formats that enable you to easily create, manage, and optimize customized campaigns in a matter of minutes. With Text Ads, you can target a premium professional audience and drive high-quality leads to your business—all on a budget that works for you.
Dynamic Ads : Dynamic ads are personalized ads tailored to each member based on their own LinkedIn profile data, such as profile photo, company name, or job title.
YouTube : YouTube is one of the most important video platforms worldwide. It’s the second largest search engine after Google. YouTube allows individuals and businesses to upload and share their videos with the world. Videos engage visitors more than textual content through site and sound. Businesses can pay YouTube for a special “channel” which promotes the products or services. On Youtube there are several marketing strategies to make for businesses:
- Content marketing : Includes videos designed to educate, inspire, and entertain, rather than directly promote your product. Videos are put in front of potential users that are searching for topics and asking questions related to your industry.
- Product marketing : Refers to any videos you post about your product or service, specifically. These videos teach potential customers about your offering and can include anything from product reviews and testimonials to demos, tutorials, and everything in between. Product marketing can help you turn your leads into customers
- Advertising: YouTube ads refer to promoting video content, or in relevant search terms in Youtube Search. Enterprises can utilize ads to increase their brand awareness, grow sales, interact with target audiences, promote events, etc.
Pinterest : It is a social media platform for people to discover, share, and organize creative ideas. It is among the fastest growing of the social media platforms. Users can organize, share visual content from around the Internet and search for them as well. Pinterest is similar to Instagram, but it differs in that every Pin can be linked back to your website or other content. Sharing or posting content on Pinterest is called “pinning.” Users “pin” a piece of new content to a “board.” Pinterest is different from other “social media platforms because it focuses more on research and inspiration. Pinterest offers some of the greatest return on investment (ROI) available in marketing online.
Blogs : Blogs allow a product or company to provide longer descriptions of products or services, can include testimonials and can link to and from other social network and blog pages.
Examples of Successful Social Media Marketing
Gillette launched a social media campaign aiming at a modern interpretation of manhood. The campaign was clearly inspired by the #MeToo movement. The short film that launched the campaign has over 30 million views.
Seventeen of the animals included in the emoji index were identified as representative of endangered species. WWF used this insight to launch a campaign to raise donations for species protection. Every retweet of an animal emoji was tracked and at the end of each month, users were given a summary of their activity, along with what their donation equivalent totaled. WWF gained over 200,000 new followers and over 59,000 donations in the first two months of the campaign alone.
Instagram carousel ads: Instagram carousel ads are slide shows in ad format, which allows instagrammers to slide through multiple images or videos in one single post.
