What Is Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing (also known as digital marketing and e-marketing) is the use of social media—the platforms on which users build social networks and share information—to build a company’s brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. In addition to providing companies with a way to engage with existing customers and reach new ones, SMM has purpose-built data analytics that allows marketers to track the success of their efforts and identify even more ways to engage.
Social media started out as a way for people to interact with friends and family but soon expanded to serve many different purposes. In 2004, MySpace was the first network to reach 1 million monthly active users
Our World in Data. “The Rise of Social Media.”
. At the start of 2023, there were 4.76 billion social media users globally—over 59% of the world’s population.
With over 80% of consumers reporting that social media—especially influencer content—significantly impacts buying decisions, marketers across industries are driving the evolution of social media marketing (SMM) from a stand-alone tool to a multipronged source of marketing intelligence on an increasingly important—and growing—audience.
Popular Social Media Platforms for Advertising
Facebook Advertising:
Ad Formats: Includes image ads, video ads, carousel ads, and more.
Targeting Options: Allows precise targeting based on demographics, interests, and behaviors.
Placement: Ads can appear in the Facebook News Feed, Stories, Messenger, and on Instagram.
Instagram Advertising:
Audience: Particularly popular among younger demographics.
Ad Formats: Photo ads, video ads, carousel ads, and Instagram Stories.
Visual Emphasis: Instagram is a highly visual platform, and ads should be visually appealing.
Twitter Advertising:
Ad Formats: Tweets, promoted trends, and promoted accounts.
Real-Time Engagement: Effective for real-time engagement and trending topics.
LinkedIn Advertising:
Audience: Ideal for B2B marketing and professional networking.
Ad Formats: Sponsored content, sponsored InMail, and display ads.
Professional Targeting: Allows targeting based on professional attributes like job title, industry, and company size.
Pinterest Advertising:
Audience: Popular among users looking for visual inspiration.
Ad Formats: Promoted Pins, which blend seamlessly with regular content.
Visual Search: Users often search for ideas, making it suitable for visually appealing products.
Why Social Media Marketing (SMM) So Powerful?
The power of SMM is driven by the unparalleled capacity of social media in three core marketing areas: connection, interaction, and customer data.
How Social Media Marketing (SMM) Works
As platforms like Facebook and Instagram took off, social media transformed not only the way we connect with one another but also the way businesses are able to influence consumer behavior—from promoting content that drives engagement to the extracting of geographic, demographic, and personal information that makes messaging resonate with users.
SMM Action Plan
The more targeted your SMM strategy is, the more effective it will be. Hootsuite, a leading software provider in the social media management space, recommends the following action plan to build an SMM campaign that has an execution framework as well as performance metrics:
Align SMM goals to clear business objectives
Learn your target customer (age, location, income, job title, industry, interests)
Conduct a competitive analysis of your competition (successes and failures)
Audit your current SMM (successes and failures)
Create a calendar for SMM content delivery
Create best-in-class content
Track performance and adjust SMM strategy as needed
Customer Relationship Management
(CRM)
Compared to traditional marketing, social media marketing has several distinct advantages, including the fact that SMM has two kinds of interaction that enable targeted customer relationship management (CRM) tools: both customer-to-customer and firm-to-customer. In other words, while traditional marketing tracks customer value primarily by capturing purchase activity, SMM can track customer value both directly (through purchases) and indirectly (through product referrals).
Shareable Content
Businesses can also convert the amplified interconnectedness of SMM into the creation of sticky content, the marketing term for attractive content that engages customers at first glance, gets them to purchase products and then makes them want to share the content. This kind of word-of-mouth advertising not only reaches an otherwise inaccessible audience but also carries the implicit endorsement of someone the recipient knows and trusts—which makes the creation of shareable content one of the most important ways that social media marketing drives growth.
Earned Media
SMM is also the most efficient way for a business to reap the benefits of another kind of earned media (a term for brand exposure from any method other than paid advertising): customer-created product reviews and recommendations.
Viral Marketing
Another SMM strategy that relies on the audience to generate the message is viral marketing, a sales technique that attempts to trigger the rapid spread of word-of-mouth product information. Once a marketing message is being shared with the general public far beyond the original target audience, it is considered viral—a very simple and inexpensive way to promote sale