What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites – such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest – to connect with your audience to build your brand, drive traffic to your website and increase sales of your products and /or services.
This involves publishing great content (see also Content Marketing) in your social media accounts, listening to and engaging with your followers when they react to it, analysing what works (and doing more of it), analysing what does not work (and doing less of it) and running social media ads (see also PPC Marketing).
The major social media channels at the moment are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, YouTube, Snap Chat and TikTok.
There are also social media messaging platforms out there such as Messenger, WhatApp and WeChat.
What Can I Use Social Media Marketing For?
Your Business can use social media in many different ways including:
- Increasing Brand / Product / Service awareness
- Monitoring brand mentions – good and bad! And responding to them
- Driving traffic to your website
- Generating new leads
- Growing revenue (by increasing sign ups and sales)
- Boost brand engagement – perception, loyalty, recommendations
- Build a community around your brand / service
- Providing customer support
- Increasing mentions in the press
What Do I Have To Consider In Social media Marketing?
There are 5 key elements to social media marketing that have to be considered:
- Strategy
- Planning and Publishing
- Listening and Engaging
- Analysing and Reporting
- Advertising – on many platforms you need to pay to be seen / heard!
How Can You Help With Our Social Media Marketing?
Green Shoots Business can help you with all the different aspects of social media marketing – starting with which platform(s) should you use!
As a minimum you should have open accounts on all the major platforms – get your name before somebody else does – and get a good SEO link back to your website!