Social media marketing is about using social media platforms to connect with your audience to build your brand, increase sales, and drive traffic to your website. To do this, you need to publish quality content on your social media profiles, listen to and engage your subscribers, analyze your results, and show ads on social media.

Social Media Marketing

The main social media platforms (currently) are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube and Snapchat.

There is also a range of social media management tools that help businesses get the most out of the social media platforms listed above. For example, Snippet 360 is a platform of social media management tools that can help you succeed in the marketing of your social media. Whether you want to develop a brand or grow your business, we want to help you succeed.

A Quick Overview of Social Media Marketing


Social media marketing started with the publication. Companies shared their content on social media to drive traffic to their websites and, hopefully, sales. But social media has matured much more than just content delivery.

Nowadays, businesses use social media in many ways. For example, a company concerned about what people say about its brand would monitor social media conversations and responses to relevant mentions (listening and engaging social media). A company that wants to understand its performance on social media would analyze its reach, engagement, and sales on social media with an analytics tool (social media analytics). A company that wants to reach a specific large-scale audience would broadcast ads on highly targeted social media (social media advertising).

All in all, they are often called social media management.

The Five Core Pillars of Social Media Marketing

1. Strategy


Before getting started and posting something on social media, let's take a step back and look at the bigger picture. The first step is to think about your social media strategy.

What are your goals? How can social media help you achieve your business goals? Some companies use social media to increase brand awareness, others use it to drive traffic and sales on their website. Social media can also help you build engagement around your brand, build a community, and serve as a customer support channel for your customers.

Which social media platforms do you want to focus on?  The main social media platforms mentioned above are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube and Snapchat. There are also smaller and emerging platforms, such as Tumblr, Tik Tok, and Anchor, as well as social messaging platforms, such as Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat. When you're starting out, it's best to choose a few platforms that your audience is targeted for rather than appearing on all platforms.

What type of content do you want to share? What kind of content will best appeal to your target audience? Is it pictures, videos or links? Is it educational or entertaining? A good place to start is to create a marketing character that will help you answer these questions. And that must not be corrected forever; you can always change your strategy based on the performance of your posts on social media.

To help you create an excellent social media strategy, here are our detailed, step-by-step guides on creating a social media strategy and marketing plan for social media.

2. Planning and Publishing


Social media marketing for small businesses usually starts with a constant presence on social media. Nearly three billion people (3,000,000,000!) Use social media. By being present on social media platforms, you give your brand the opportunity to be discovered by your future customers.

Publishing on social media is as easy as sharing a blog post, image or video on a social media platform. It's like sharing your personal profile on Facebook. But you will want to plan your content in advance instead of creating and publishing content spontaneously. In addition, to ensure you maximize your reach on social media, you must publish great content that your audience likes, at the right time and at the right frequency.

There are now a variety of social media planning tools, such as buffering, that can help you publish your content automatically at the time you prefer. This saves you time and allows you to reach your audience when it is most likely to engage in your content.

3. Listening and Engagement


As your business and social media grow, conversations about your brand will also intensify. People comment on your publications on social networks, tag you in their publications or send you a message directly.

People could even talk about your brand on social media without you knowing it. So you want to monitor social media conversations about your brand. If the comment is positive, you will have a chance to surprise and delight them. If not, you can offer support and correct a situation before it gets worse.

You can manually check all your notifications on all social media platforms, but this is not effective and you will not see messages that do not help your business profile. You can also use a social listening and engagement tool, such as Snippet360 Reply, which includes all mentions and all your messages on social networks, including posts that have not tagged the profile. Social network of your company.

4. Analytics


Along the way, whether you're posting content or engaging in social media, you'll want to know how your social media marketing is doing. Do you join more people on social media than last month? 

How many positive mentions do you get per month? How many people have used the hashtag of your brand on their social media posts?

The social media platforms themselves provide a basic level of this information. For more in-depth analytics or to easily compare different social media platforms, you can use the wide range of available social media analytics tools, such as Snippet 360 Analyze (closed beta).

5. Advertising


When you have more funds to develop your social media marketing, you can consider advertising on social networks. Social media ads let you reach a wider audience than those who follow you.

Advertising platforms on social networks are so powerful today that you can specify exactly who to view your ads. You can create target audiences based on their demographics, interests, behaviors, and so on.

When running multiple social media campaigns at the same time, consider using a social media ad tool to bulk edit, automate processes, and optimize your ads.