Mediaboss Marketing

You can create devoted fans of your business through your social media strategy.

Social media marketing is a digital marketing strategy that uses social media to promote your business online.

When you market your business with social media, you use different social media networks, like Facebook or Instagram, to connect, engage, and communicate with your target audience, as well as promote your products or services to drive brand awareness, website traffic, and sales.

It sounds easy enough, but there is more to social media marketing than meets the eye.

Want to watch a video about the basics of social media? Weve included one below.

This guide serves as your partner for getting started with social media. Use it to learn how to bring social media and marketing together. Plus, get inspiration from real-life social media marketing campaigns.

Hit this button to learn how the pros succeed on social media

Social media success doesnt happen overnight. It requires time and dedication, as well as some strategic know-how, to launch a successful marketing and advertising strategy for social media. Thats why, before creating your social media plan, you want to learn its core components (or action steps).

Five critical components make up social media marketing:

A successful, long-term social media initiative depends on a strategy. Spontaneous posts are great, but you want a plan driving your overall routine decisions, like how often you post, what you post, and more.

Build the foundation of your social media marketing plan by answering these questions:

Using your answers, you can create an outline for your social media strategy.

For example, you may decide that you want to focus on Facebook and LinkedIn, based on your audience research, versus Instagram and Twitter. Or, that you want to invest in a tool forscheduling your social media posts, as well as responding to users.

While this step involves a lot of thinking, dont skip it. Its essential to your strategys success.

Content powers your social media marketing, whether youre sharing blog posts, launching ads, or posting videos. You need to provide your audience with content to interact with thats how you engage your followers.

As a part of planning your strategy, answer the following questions:

Creating a hypotheticalcontent calendarcan help your business work through these questions. You can use the calendar to see how much content you need to produce, as well as outline what content would get posted when. A content calendar can also help you see the value in investing in a scheduling tool.

In addition to brainstorming a social media content calendar, you should think about ways to repurpose that content. If youre creating content for your blog to share on social media, for instance, think about optimizing that content forsearch engine optimization (SEO)to attract more traffic to your site.

Researching when you should post your content will also maximize the success of your social media marketing strategy. While you can do some initial research, you can also use data (after launching your content) to determine the best posting time for your business.

Social media marketing involves more than sharing it also involves one-on-one interactions.

When you decide to invest in social media, you choose to interact with your target audience in a new way. From public comments to private messages, social networks offer you a whole new channel (and toolset) for communicating with your market.

A couple of questions youll want to answer before you get started include the following:

Listening, engaging, and responding to users is one of the most critical parts of social media marketing.

Invest a significant amount of time in this step. For example, if you decide to create a guidebook for answering and responding to users, great! Itll become a beyond-useful reference for your team and help you make the most of every interaction.

While you dont have to use tools for social media, its often recommended to invest in at least one especially for social media listening and engagement. These tools can help you monitor activity across all your channels, as well as respond fast. They make your life easier and your strategy stronger.

A few examples of some go-to tools for social media listening and engagement include:

Many of these tools offer free trials, so experiment and see which one works best for your team.

Even though theyre optional, social media ad campaigns dont seem that way. Thats because social media algorithms prioritize content from users versus businesses. Instead of seeing your companys post, a social media network like Facebook will give priority to a post from a users friend.

Thats why its worth considering a social media ad campaign, which helps you:

If you want to try advertising on social media, answer these questions first:

The advantage of advertising on social media, as well as other digital ad networks, is that you have complete control over your budget. You can spend any amount you like. Plus, you only pay when users take a specified action, like clicking on your ad.

Think about includingsocial media advertisingin your strategy, because it can help you succeed.

Social media marketing offers your business a helpful amount of action data. Via your data (or analytics), you can gain insight into your audience. That insight can help you make informed changes to your approach, resulting in more brand awareness, website traffic, and sales.

Again, youll want to answer a few questions before getting started:

Free tools, like Google Analytics, can get you started.

Most social media platforms, like Twitter and Facebook, will also provide you with some initial data.Google Analytics works well because it can help you see the impact on social on your website, like by revealing the amount of traffic social brings to your site.

Many businesses use social media marketing in conjunction with other marketing channels to develop an interactive, multichannel plan. Some campaigns, however, stand out in their own right, accomplishing the companys goalswithout the assistance of traditional marketing. Here are a few examples of successful social media marketing campaigns.

One of the reasons social media is so popular is because it gives users a chance to join in the conversation. A good social marketing campaign should let them be active participants. Thats exactly what Lays did with itsDo Us a Flavorcampaign in which loyal customers submitted their ideas for a new potato chip flavor for a chance to win $1 million from Frito-Lay.

The company set up a dedicated website and then asked people to submit their ideas onFacebookand Twitter. Nearly 4 million people responded, and Lays tested the most promising choices. After narrowing the field to three options, the company produced the finalists, sold them in retail outlets, and asked consumers to go back to social media to choose their favorites.

Sales of Lays Potato Chips increased by 12 percent the first time the contest ran, but it generated so many mentions that Frito-Lay ran the contest again in 2014. That year, 14 million people submitted ideas and the Lays Facebook page generated 6 million likes.

For-profit companies arent the only ones that can generate money from a great social media campaign. Make-a-Wish Foundation proved the power of social media in nonprofit marketing with one of its biggest gifts ever. In 2013, Miles Scott, a 5-year-old who had been battling cancer most of his life, wanted to be Batkid for a day. The foundation put together an event and sent an email a month beforehand to enlist a few volunteers to help out.

The story went viral thanks to supporters on Twitter and Instagram, and 12,000 people ended up contributing their time and talents. In fact, the story generated so much publicity that the entire city of San Francisco turned into Gotham City for a day. Although the campaign was meant to make one kids dream come true, national interest in the story helped the Make-a-Wish Foundation increase donations by 26 percent.

Some social media marketing plans succeed because of buy-in from other businesses. Such was the case with Purple Your Profile, a joint project by Chevy and the American Cancer Society that was created to raise more money for cancer research.

The campaign actually began on TV with aSuper Bowl ad, but it quicklymigrated to social media. Viewers of the ad were asked to color their profile pictures purple to show they supported the fight against cancer. For every purple profile picture, General Motors donated $1 to cancer research.

By the end of the campaign, 1.3 million Facebook users and 700,000 Twitter users responded, helping to generate more than $2 million in donations to the American Cancer Society. Meanwhile, Chevy got 5x the number of likes on Facebook, and the story appeared 45 million times in news feeds.

Social media marketing requires the same basic element as any other channel: the right message sent to the right person at the right time. What differentiates it from other channels is the level of power consumers have over your message.

In most marketing channels, you control the communication. You decide when and how to reach out, and consumers have the choice of responding or not. Those parameters dont exist on social media. Consumers are going to talk about your business (and your competitors) whether you want them to or not.

In other marketing scenarios, this would likely motivate you to ramp up your campaigns and send out even more promotions. However, social media audiences arent sharing adstheyre sharing content that interests them, regardless of where it comes from. The way to get into their conversations isnt to talk more loudly about your products and services, but rather to talk about the things that interest them.

That doesnt mean you have to abandon your goals of spreading the word about your business and increasing revenue. It just means you have to take a different approach towards meeting those goals.

Social media marketingrelates to search engine optimization, also called SEO, by influencing search results. While Google does not use social media as a direct reference for its rankings, social media indirectly affects Googles rankings.

People use social media in a lot of different ways, including to share content.

When people share content, like an infographic, it sometimes goes viral. People move from not only sharing the content on social media but also websites. A news site, for instance, links to the infographic and the site hosting that infographic.

Thatlinkserves as a trust signal to search engines like Google. Since links play a significant part in how Google ranks websites in search results, that link can help improve the rankings of the website hosting the infographic.

In this all-too-common scenario, social influences search, which is why its a component of SEO.

Social media is just one element of an overall digital marketing strategy, but it can be one of the most effective if you use it well.

Still wondering, What is social media marketing? Check out any of the additional resources weve linked to on this page.

If you want to start using social media to grow your business, or improve upon your current profiles and strategy, contact us! Our dedicated team of social media experts is more than happy to help you reach and engage with potential customers.

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Social Media Marketing: What It Is and How To Get Started