Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with your audience and build your brand, increase sales and drive website traffic. This involves posting quality content on social media profiles, listening and engaging with followers, analyzing results and running social media ads.
The main social media platforms (at the moment) are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube and Snapchat.
There are also a number of social media management tools that help businesses get the most out of the social media platforms mentioned above. For example, Buffer is a social media management tool platform that can help you achieve success with your social media marketing. Whether you want to build a brand or grow your business, we want to help you succeed.
A quick overview of social media marketing
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Social media marketing started with publishing. Companies shared their content on social networks to generate traffic to their websites and, hopefully, sales. But social media has matured far beyond being just a place to disseminate content.
Social media marketing
is a very important part of social media.
Today, companies use social networks in many different ways. For example, a company that cares about what people are saying about its brand can monitor social media conversations and respond to relevant mentions (social media listening and engagement). A company that wants to know how it is performing on social networks will analyze its reach, engagement and sales on social networks with an analytics tool (social network analytics). Una empresa que quiera llegar a un conjunto específico de público a gran escala, publicará anuncios muy específicos en las redes sociales (publicidad en las redes sociales).
En su conjunto, suelen conocerse también como gestión de redes sociales.
Los cinco pilares fundamentales del marketing en la estrategia de redes sociales:
- Planificación y publicación
- Publicación en Buffer
- Escucha y compromiso
- Análisis e informes
- Buffer Analyze
- Publicidad
Strategy
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Before you jump into posting something on social media, let’s take a step back and look at the big picture. The first step is to think about your social media strategy.
What are your goals, and how can social media help you achieve your business objectives? Some businesses use social media to raise awareness of their brand, while others use it to increase website traffic and sales. Social media can also help you generate engagement around your brand, build a community and serve as a customer service channel.
Social media can also help you generate engagement around your brand, build a community and serve as a customer service channel.
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, emerging platforms, such as Tumblr, Tik Tok and Anchor, and social messaging platforms, such as Messenger, WhatsApp and WeChat. When starting out, it’s better to choose a few platforms that you think your target audience is on than to be on all of them.
What type of content do you want to share? What type of content will best appeal to your target audience? Is it images, videos or links? Is it educational or entertaining content? A good starting point is to create a marketing persona, which will help you answer these questions. And this doesn’t have to be fixed forever; you can always change your strategy based on the performance of your social media posts.
To help you create a good social media strategy, here are our step-by-step guides to creating a social media strategy and marketing plan.
Planning and publishing
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Social media marketing for small businesses usually starts with having a consistent social media presence. Nearly three billion people (3,000,000,000,000!) use social networks. By being present on social media platforms, you give your brand the opportunity to be discovered by your future customers.
Posting on social media is as simple as sharing a blog post, image or video on a social media platform. It’s just like sharing on your personal Facebook profile. However, it is wise to plan your content in advance rather than creating and posting content spontaneously. Also, to make sure you’re maximizing your social media reach, you need to post great content that your audience likes, at the right time and frequency.
There are now a number of social media scheduling tools, such as Buffer Publish, that can help you automatically post your content at the time of your choice. This saves you time and allows you to reach your audience when they’re most likely to engage with your content.
Listen and engage
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Listen and engage
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As your business and social media following grows, conversations about your brand will also grow. People will comment on your social media posts, tag you in their social media posts, or message you directly.
It’s even possible for people to talk about your brand on social media without your knowledge. So you may want to monitor social media conversations about your brand. If it’s positive feedback, you have the opportunity to surprise and delight them. If not, you can offer support and correct a situation before it gets worse.
You can manually check all notifications on all social media platforms, but this is not efficient and you will not see posts that do not tag your company’s social media profile. Instead, you can use a social media listening and engagement tool that aggregates all social media mentions and posts, including posts that didn’t tag your company’s social media profile.
Analytics
Analytics
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Along the way, whether you’re posting content or engaging on social media, you’ll want to know how your social media marketing is performing. Are you reaching more people on social media than you did last month? How many positive mentions are you getting per month? How many people have used your brand’s hashtag in their social media posts
How many people have used your brand’s hashtag in their social media posts?
The social media platforms themselves provide a basic level of this information. For more detailed analytics information or to easily compare across social media platforms, you can use the wide range of social media analytics tools available, such as Buffer Analyze.
The social media platforms themselves provide this basic level of information.
Advertising
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Advertising
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When you have more funds to grow your social media marketing, one area you may want to consider is social media advertising. Social media ads allow you to reach a wider audience than just the one that follows you.
When you have more funds to grow your social media marketing, one area to consider is social media advertising.
Social media advertising platforms are so powerful these days that you can specify exactly who to show your ads to. You can create target audiences based on their demographics, interests, behaviors, and much more.
If you are running many social media advertising campaigns at once, you may want to consider using a social media advertising tool to make mass changes, automate processes and optimize your ads.
If you are running many social media advertising campaigns at once, you may want to consider using a social media advertising tool to make mass changes, automate processes and optimize your ads.
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Social media marketing resources
Social media platforms are constantly evolving. When Facebook started, people could only share text updates. Now, there are many content formats, including images, videos, live videos and stories.
So, social media marketing is also always changing. We want to help you keep up with the latest changes and strategies to succeed in social media. Here are a few resources to get you started.
