Social Media Marketing / SMM

Social media marketing is a powerful marketing tool used by large, small and emerging companies, from all specialties, for many reasons like:

• Reach out to potential clients and increase their numbers.
• Promote conversion.
• Increase brand awareness and create loyal customers.
• Increase sales and make profits.

There is a wide range of social media platforms that you can use to achieve these marketing goals and others, but you must take into consideration some tips that must be followed before starting marketing through these platforms, which experts in e-marketing agreed on it through social media platforms from all over the world.

What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing: It is a form of internet marketing, which is concerned with meeting the target audience and potential customers wherever they are and at all times.

It includes creating promotional content for your business, products, and services, in line with the social media platform on which it will be shared (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or others), in order to achieve marketing goals and increase awareness of your brand.

Social media marketing includes many activities, such as:

Post text updates, photos, videos, and other content that stimulates audience engagement, as well as paid social media ads.

Marketing goals that social media platforms help to achieve

Social media marketing can help you achieve a number of marketing goals, the most important of them are:

• Raising brand awareness

  Social media has proven its ability to boost brand awareness in two things:

  First: Increasing social participation, which includes:

  • Comments
  • Likes
  • Posts
  • Republish

Second: direct traffic to your site by including direct links to your website in your profile, bio, and posts.

• Strengthening relationships with clients:

The larger and more engaged your audience is on social media, the easier it will be for you to achieve all the marketing goals you aspire to.

Through constant contact and interaction with your followers on social networks, you will be able to build lasting relationships between them and your business.

You can do this by:

• • Interact with customers on posts.
  • Responding to customer questions and comments.
  • Provide clients with the support and assistance they need.

You can also ask your followers questions about your products, offer contests and giveaways to help you build trust, and show how much you appreciate their posts and support.

• Generate more leads and boost conversions:

Promoting and sharing your products on social media is a simple and effective way to improve lead generation and increase conversions and sales because you advertise to people who really choose to interact with you by following your account.

Here are some ways you can use social media platforms to generate more leads:

• • Create contests for visitors and followers to share your profiles on social media.
  • Include your website links and offers in the bio sections of your profiles.
  • Include live videos to announce your products and updates, or to convey some details about exciting news in your company.
  • Implement a social media marketing campaign on one of your channels.
  • Sell ​​your products through your social profiles.

For example, you can enable the Facebook shopping section or the Instagram shopping feature on your personal files. These features allow your visitors and followers to click on the products you have shared in posts to view information such as price, material, and size.
And after that; Visitors can easily follow the payment process through the platform, and purchase the product directly from you.

• Learn from the competitors:

Social media is a great way to keep track of your competitors and learn their news, such as:

• • Refer to their strategies and plans on social media.
  • The products they are promoting.
  • Campaigns they carry out.
  • The level of their interaction with followers.

Social media allows you to look at your competitors’ experiences and see what works for you, and what is not recommended compared to them.

Thus, social media helps you decide what needs to change and what needs to be maintained or developed in relation to your company’s marketing approach.

Also, auditing your competitors’ social accounts can help you ensure that your marketing looks unique to them, and highlights your brand attractively.

Steps to verify the effectiveness of a social media marketing plan

After we know some of the marketing goals that social media platforms help us to achieve, we must make sure that the marketing plan that we followed is sustainable and positively affects our work.

This can be verified by following five steps:

• Find and adopt audience and customer personas:

  The first step to creating a social media marketing strategy is identifying the buyer and audience so that you can appropriately target their needs and interests.

  To do this; Think about the people you are trying to reach, why you chose them, and how you categorize them into groups.

  By looking at the buyer personas and the audience, you will then be able to determine what content will attract the followers and customers that you hope to acquire, and how you can create engaging content to keep them interested.

• Determine the social platforms to be marketed

There aren’t necessarily right or wrong systems when it comes to the basic social systems that your business should use in marketing your services or products.

It’s more about the needs of your target audience first, and the social media platform where they tend to spend their long time second.

It is very important that you are where your audience is among potential customers today, and if they move to another platform tomorrow, you should follow them.

• Create unique and engaging content:

  With billions of social media users around the world, there is no longer any doubt that some of your followers have also viewed your competitors’ content or that of other companies operating in your industry.

  Therefore, take into account the content that your competitors share, including pictures, videos, blogs, etc., and think about how you can uniquely promote your products compared to them until you have distinct and attractive content that highlights your brand over others, and provides your followers with a reason to click on the “follow” button and interact With your brand.

  You can also benefit from the features that the platform provides for the platform you are using.

  For example, you can create videos directly on the Facebook platform to share the latest details about your premium product launch.

  You can also use existing customers and promoters to help you create content by reposting their content or encouraging them to use your own hashtag to share their photos and experiences with your products.

• Organizing a schedule for the posts:

One of the easiest ways to ensure that your content is shared as planned is to use a social media management solution.

These tools give you many options, the most important of which are:

• • Writing captions.
  • Preparing photos and videos.
  • Pre-schedule posts.
  • Share your content automatically at the specified time.
  • Monitor all post interactions and posts for you.

Social media management solutions also save you time and allow you to focus on your other tasks.

Among the most important tools that you can use:

• HubSpot :

  HubSpot offers a social media tool (as part of its marketing program) to help you publish and monitor your content and create authentic connections with your followers.

  With it, you can schedule your content, pre-publish it, and compare in-depth reports on engagement with your posts to understand the performance of different platforms, the right content types, and the most appropriate times to post.

• Sprout Social :

  Is a social media marketing and management solution designed to help your team:

  1. 1. Organize and plan content creation.
     2. Campaign management.
     3. Organizing posts.
     4. Review and analyze content reports.

• Hootsuite :

  It is a social media management platform for finding, scheduling, managing and reporting your content.

  With it, you can pre-schedule posts on all of your channels at once, and measure your ROI with comprehensive content analysis.

  You might ask:

  How often should I post content to my social media channels?

  As a general rule: You should only post on social networks when you have reasons to post, and worthy of posting content.

  This is the best criterion by which to strike the right balance when it comes to the frequency of posting.

  If you don’t post frequently and follow events, your followers will forget you.

  And if you post a lot (with or without), you can potentially become annoying to them.

Either way, it can lead to a loss of followers and a decrease in engagement.

To avoid this, there are plenty of studies and resources available that you can follow, which explain the criteria for post-frequency on social media by industry and platform.

Each industry differs in the preference of the platforms used, so first find what suits and prefers your audience so that it is valuable and enjoyable.

Then you can start experimenting with more or fewer posts, taking into account other factors such as the time of day you post on social networks to determine which time provides the highest level of engagement.

Impact and outcome analysis

One of the most important aspects of social media marketing is ensuring the success of your efforts in helping you achieve your goals.

In order to determine this, you will need to track all of your posts on each channel and analyze impacts and outcomes by reviewing and managing your social media analytics metrics.

Here are 10 of the most important metrics to track:

1. Participation:

   It includes clicks, comments, likes, and responses to your social media posts.

   There are also platform-specific sharing types such as saved posts on Instagram and Pinned posts.

2. Arrival:

   Your reach is the number of people who viewed any content related to your page or profile.

3. Followers:

   This is the number of people on your profile who have clicked the “follow” button and regularly viewed your content in their journal.

4. Impressions:

   This is the number of times a post from your profile or page is viewed, whether or not your followers clicked on it.

   And this is what happens most often when people scroll through their news page, but without clicking on anything.

5. Video Views:

   And that is on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, or any other social channel that includes video capabilities, which is the number of views it gets.

6. Profile visits:

   The number of people who visited your profile.

7. signals:

   This is the number of times the audience has mentioned your profile in their posts.

8. Signs:

   This happens when your followers add your company profile name or hashtag to another post.

9. Republish:

   This happens when one of your followers posts part of your content to their profile.

10. Posts:

    The posts that your followers and audience take from your profile and share on their pages.

    You can also use the analysis tools included in the different platforms that you use, such as:

    • Twitter Analytics.
    • Facebook Analytics.
    • Instagram insights.

You can also use Google Analytics to track your social media and website analytics.

Finally, we remind you that the social media scheduling solutions we mentioned initially have built-in monitoring and tracking features automatically, which will give you a better understanding of what your followers and target audience prefer and respond to, and what you should consider changing to improve engagement.