What is Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Marketing (SMM) is the activities or processes for selling or promoting a brand, product, or service using social media channels. These processes which form a social media marketing strategy include:
- understanding your target audience
- creating and posting content on social media platforms
- engaging with followers
- running social media advertisements
- and analyzing your results.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing for SMEs
Social media allows businesses to engage with customers and build relationships with them. It's the perfect place to humanize your brand and show off the people behind your company. It gives a voice to brands, helps you reach new audiences, and drives sales.
Social media platforms provide brands with a virtual social place where people go to learn about them, make purchases, and connect. It offers countless opportunities to direct a potential customer to a website or make a purchase, even faster than email, the once preferred online communication method.
Social media is a low-cost, highly effective way for businesses of any size to reach potential customers. Do many avenues for social media marketing are free. You can use it to grow your following rapidly, generate leads and make sales without spending a dime on advertising if you do it right.
What are the best social media marketing channels?
As of April 2022
- Facebook had 2.936 billion monthly active users with 999.8 million users on Facebook Messenger
- Twitter had 465.1 million users
- LinkedIn had 828.1 million
- TikTok had over 1 billion
- And there were 1.452 billion users on Instagram.
What a gift! So many people to discover, buy in and share on your brand. No wonder social media marketing is the choice of marketers to reach and gain customers for any type of business, big or small.
These figures, however, mean nothing without a good social media marketing strategy in place. A plan outlining exactly who you want to sell to and why will help you choose your platforms wisely, saving you time and money.
Why promote on Tik Tok when your target audience is busy scrolling Facebook? Let's go a little deeper on social media platform users (as of January 2022) to see how they fit with your target audience:
Should I be marketing on Facebook?
Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world with nearly 3 billion monthly active user. This makes it a must-have for your brand presence. It also gives businesses the biggest possible reach.
With that many users you'll be able to get your business in front of your target audience, no matter what your business sells. It is also important to note that 9.3 per cent of Facebook's audience were women between the ages of 18 and 24 years, while male users between the ages of 25 and 34 constituted the biggest demographic group on the social media platform.
Should I be marketing on Instagram?
Instagram is the ultimate visual marketing platform. Combined with the fact it is part of the Facebook/Meta group there are many opportunities, especially for those who have a strong brand. The social media app is most popular amongst younger audiences, with the vast majority of users aged between 18 and 34.
Should I be marketing on LinkedIn?
Linked is a great place to promote your business, especially if you are in the professional services game or focused on b2b channels. It only has 250 million active users a month, but those users are high net-worth and represent a great opportunity to promote luxury items. 47.9 percent of users are female, and 52.1 percent are male in the United States. Overall, there was a slight decrease in female users of the business networking platform from the previous year.
Should I be marketing on Twitter?
If you want to engage actively with your community, then there is no better place to do that than Twitter. Twitter users have a strong sense of social justice to don't shy away from trending topics, hashtags are still the best way to get a pulse for what people are talking about. Overall, 43.6 percent of Twitter users were female, and the remaining 56.4 percent were male.
Should I be marketing on Tik Tok?
The world's fastest-growing social media platform is a great place to be, especially if you are targeting a younger audience. Tiktock is the best place to be amongst the larger social media players because organic content still gets great reach. And as of March 2021, female users accounted for 61 percent of TikTok's active user accounts in the United States. According to App Ape, male users only accounted for 39 percent of the video-sharing app's user base on the Android platform.
How to create a good content schedule for social media
The life of a content creator is to plan, create, schedule, review and repeat. Depending on your metrics of course .
How to plan your content for social media
Without a plan, you're engaging in what's known as 'blind marketing.' Creating a content strategy is pretty straightforward. It is like a what, where, and when map for your brand's content needs. It's driven by the objectives and goals of your business marketing and digital strategies.
Here is a quick recap on what a marketing strategy is vs. a digital marketing strategy:
A marketing strategy enables you to define your vision, mission, and business goals by outlining the steps you need to achieve these aims. It helps you identify potential customers and develop ways to reach them more effectively (and for less money) than your competitors. If you need help writing a small business marketing plan, read this.
A digital marketing strategy refers to a plan covering all aspects of your online marketing, from what you post on social media to investing ad dollars. In other words, it's the moment-by-moment blueprint for how you will get your company noticed online.
Drawing from these strategies, your content plan will clearly define the type of content (evergreen, AI-generated, time-sensitive, UGC, sales), how that looks (video, presentation, audio, still, blog, meme, etc.), and how to share it (where and when) for maximum results.
How to create social media content
Before we go into this, have you checked out our all-in-one social media solution made for SMEs? We have an extensive media library and image editing tools to create on-brand social media content that will make your content stand out from the rest.
How to choose the right imagry for social media
Visuals are a powerful way to connect with your audience and engage them on multiple levels. Brands and bloggers who use visually compelling images are getting 2x to 3x improvement over those who don't. Did you know that including a picture in your tweet could lead to over 2X more shares?
Anyone using social media understands that an image in a post creates an impact. The higher the emotional effect an image has on a viewer, the greater the engagement.
Check out The Metigy Best Practice Guide to creating images that work.
Copywriting for social media
Writing great social media copy is a skill that most people can manage or even master, with some guidance. It doesn't matter whether you are a novice social marketer, blogger, or even very experienced; there is a lot you can do to improve the impact of your copy.
Go back to your digital marketing strategy. Be clear on your objectives, your audience, and how to speak to that audience on your selected platform. Read more.
How to use video for social media
Video is the biggest differentiator in small business marketing. A video can elevate a blog or social media post and increase your marketing campaign's engagement.
Social media platforms love videos and show video posts more frequently than others. Video also helps with SEO and can boost page layout on your website. Websites with videos rank higher when compared to text-based content and images.
Here is an easy way to make video content using Metigy's in-house video maker.
How to use user-generated content (UGC) on social media
"User-generated content (UGC) is content from the champions of your brand's service or product that you can be share on to your blog, via social media, even local directories, or other community-driven platforms like groups or forums. This can be any type of content, from a text to a video, a review, or an image created by a person not associated with the brand (aka a 'user').
Tools for creating and managing social media content
Social media marketing isn’t and doesn’t have to be hard. With the right tools, anyone can get amazing business growth online. Here’s how we can help.
Metigy's social media management platform
Metigy is an all-in-one marketing platform, built to empower SMEs to create amazing content across the world's largest social media marketing channels.
You can read more about how Metigy makes social media easy for SMEs around the world by following this link.
