What is social media marketing anyway?

Social media marketing (also refereed to as SMM) is a form of internet marketing implemented on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with the aim of growing brand awareness. Social media marketing primarily covers activities involving social sharing of content, videos, and images for marketing purposes, as well as paid social media advertising . Based on the principle of organic search, social media marketing help improve the ranking of websites that are connected to active social networking pages

Why should you use social media marketing?

Let's take Facebook for example; There are currently 17 million South Africans on Facebook, 58 percent of facebook users have liked a brand, 42 percent mentioned a brand in their status update, and 41 percent have shared a video, story or link about a brand. Getting people to talk about your business on social media is a great way of increasing brand awareness, leading to engagement and ultimately conversion

Social Media marketing is a cost effecting way of communicating directly with your target audience in order to, build long term relationship, get feedback, offer customer service and educate them on how to better use your product and services.

How can you use social media marketing effectively?

Sorry to disappoint you but there is no shortcut and guesswork will not help your brand in a long run. Increasing your brand awareness on social media is not magic. Before you start creating social media pages, find out which social media platform your  target audience on. You can do this by searching for relevant conversations about your product or industry. 

Once you know where your target audience is, grab their attention by using eye-catching visuals with your content. Images and videos play a big role in helping you grow your brand awareness on social media channels. Because they increase engagement and boost social shares. Here are some tips for you:

• Social media is all about building conversations,  talk, listen and get involved. Showcase your personality by conversing, tagging and mentioning others.
• Again, don't guess. Use available tracking tools like bitdo  , Facebook Page Insights , and Google Analytics to measure your social media activity to gain to understand what’s working so that you can optimise your efforts and build a stronger brand with social media.
• To get higher engagement rate and better brand awareness, work on building brand authority and credibility  by  sharing real value content. Along with borrowed content, post original content that shows your expertise on subject matter.

Of course there are many other ways you can use to advertise your brand, whatever you do, ensure that your target audience is talking about your brand, engaging and learning from you. By doing so, you are not only building long term relationship with your target audience, but you are building authority and credibility for your business.

What do you think of social media marketing? have we left anything out?  share your thoughts with us