11 Steps in Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing (SMM) is a form of internet marketing that uses social media apps as a marketing tool. Producing relevant content that users will share with their own networks helps brands increase their exposure. It also extends their reach toward fans, potential customers and even potential employees when used as a recruitment tool.
Social media marketing also enables organizations to get customer feedback while making the company seem more personable. Social media enables organizations to create relationships with their audience. It gives end users a platform to ask questions, voice complaints and generally be heard. It also gives brands the opportunity to respond, adapt and adjust business processes or products.
Some popular social media apps include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram and Snapchat. Each platform has elements that makes it attractive to use. And when a company uses several in combination to deliver a multichannel message, consumers can see those messages on their preferred channels.
Social media management is the ongoing process of managing your online presence on social media platforms. It involves creating, publishing, and analyzing content you post on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, as well as engaging with users on those platforms.
11 Steps in Social Media Marketing
You know the definition of social media management and what social media management for businesses typically focuses on — now, learn where to begin when it comes to managing your social media marketing campaign. Check out these steps to ensure you start off on the right foot:
1| Audit your existing social media strategy.
If you already have an existing strategy, you’ll want to take some time to audit it to find out what’s working and what’s not. You can analyze your social media metrics to spot trends, scope out your competitors’ social media pages, and more.
2| Research your target audience.
Know who your audience is, and you’ll know where to find them on social media. Use existing data from your website visitors, marketing campaigns, and customers to determine your target audience so you can reach them on their favorite social media networks.
3| Choose your social media platforms.
There are a variety of platforms to choose from, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and much more. Creating a profile for every single platform can be time-consuming, so make sure you choose the platforms where your target audience spends most of their time.
4| Create your social media strategy.
Now it’s time to build your strategy. In most cases, you’ll focus on building a strategy for each platform due to the different roles and uses of Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social media platforms.
5| Design your social media profiles.
When designing your social media platform, be sure to ensure it reflects and represents your brand so users can instantly recognize your company.
6| Develop your social media ads.
Depending on your budget and strategy, you may want to launch social media ads. These targeted advertisements enable you to create posts that will appear in your target audience’s newsfeed as they scroll through their updates even if they aren’t currently following your page.
7| Build your social media content calendar.
You’ll need to keep your page active to engage your audience on social media. Create a content calendar to plan out what content you will post and how often to keep yourself organized.
8| Create platform-specific content.
Not only will you need to create a content calendar, but you’ll also need to create the content itself. Depending on your platform, you can create a variety of social media content types, including videos, images, text-only posts, and more.
9| Respond to your social media followers.
A day-to-day responsibility included for many social media managers is interacting with your followers and commenters. You’ll want to respond to comments on your posts, direct messages, questions, and more. This helps your company build brand awareness, increase engagement, and deliver excellent customer service that boosts brand loyalty and trust.
10| Grow your social reach.
Growing your reach on social media is also a big part of your management responsibilities. You can reach out to influencers and other brands to help get your company and products or services in front of more people online.
11| Monitor your social media performance.
A critical part of social media management is monitoring the performance of your efforts. You’ll want to track the performance of your ads, as well as creative content, and analyze those results to spot any trends that can inform your strategy moving forward.
Conclusion
Hopefully, you now can see that you’d be far better off hiring a social media manager than not. Someone who can contribute 100% to your brand’s strategy and goals will yield a much better result than having an intern or low-level employee posting content at random on behalf of your brand.
