Social media marketing is a powerful way for marketers to promote products or services and increase brand awareness. Nowadays, everyone is available on social media platforms, from teenagers to senior citizens. People discover about most of the brands from social media platform marketing. There are many social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn that you can use to market your brand. 

Effective social media marketing can help you not only increase your reach but bring new leads to your business. Social media marketing for business can aid you in creating brand advocates and driving sales. This social media marketing guide will help you learn basic social media marketing, the use of social media marketing, and how to do marketing on social media. 

Social media marketing statistics 

First, let’s have a look at the statistics for understanding social media marketing impact. From these social media marketing basics, you’ll know why social media business marketing is essential. 

These are some of the major social media marketing statistics from which you can understand how much people indulge in social media platforms.

What is social media marketing?

Definition of social media marketing: Social media marketing is the process of creating content for social media platforms to promote your products or services. Marketing on social media platforms can help you to increase brand awareness, bring more customers to your website, and boost sales. 

The social media marketing process can help you reach your customers where they are and interact with them to inform them about your brand. Your social media marketing strategy depends on which social media platforms your target audience are active. 

Social media marketing platforms 

In this section, we will discuss different social media platforms where you can do social media marketing business. 

1. Facebook 

Facebook is the largest social media platform with 1.9 billion daily active users. People of different age groups are active on Facebook to connect and communicate with their friends & family. It offers advanced advertising tools that marketers can use for paid advertising. 

Facebook also has the most extensive local business directories. You can also list your business to make people find you easily. It is a great platform to maintain relationships with your existing customers. You can announce events, hold discussions, and live streams on Facebook. 

2. Instagram 

Instagram has around 1 billion monthly active users. This platform is popular for its different content formats like stories, reels, images, videos, and IGTV. People use Instagram to follow people, influencers, and brands they like & prefer. The best thing about this social media marketing platform is that it offers advanced eCommerce tools. 

Instagram advertising cost is higher than Facebook. However, Instagram’s organic reach is also high. People can easily search and find brands, browse their products or services, and make a purchase without leaving the app. 

3. Twitter 

Twitter is a social media marketing platform with 211 million daily active users. It is the best platform to share quick thoughts and conduct discussions. Most people use Twitter to get the latest news and to follow brands & celebrities to get updates about them. 

People also use Twitter to appreciate or complain about brands. Thus, it’s important to have a Twitter account for your business and reply to people. Having a Twitter account can help you in making yourself available to customers whenever they tweet about you. 

4. LinkedIn 

LinkedIn is a professional social media marketing platform that has around 774 million active users around the world. This is the only platform with a clearly defined audience i.e. students and working professionals. 

You can use LinkedIn to expand your network and share your company insights. You can talk about your business and how it is different from others. You can create your company page where you can share about new job opportunities and company culture. 

5. YouTube 

As per statistics, YouTube is a social media marketing platform with more than 315 million daily active users. You can create a YouTube channel for your business where in you can post your videos, product demos, and customer testimonials. 

Youtube is a good platform for sharing educational content. You can use YouTube to deliver value to your customers. You can post videos on your YouTube channel and market them through other social media marketing channels. 

6. Snapchat 

Snapchat is a social media marketing platform with around 306 million daily active users across the world. It has 75% of its users in the age group of 13-34. Snapchat can help you do location-based marketing for your business. You can use Snapchat to build an audience by posting fun images and short videos. 

Benefits of social media marketing 

From the above information, you must have understood the basics of social media marketing. Social media for marketing can help you in many different ways given below. 

1. Increase your brand awareness 

As you know many people are available on social media, it’s a great way to reach your potential customers. Social media can help you create awareness about your products or services. You can let people know that you exist in the market. 

By having a social media account, you can communicate with your prospects personally. You can post interesting content and share your website link with it. This way you can drive traffic to your business website. 

2. Get leads and drive conversions 

By posting compelling content you can generate leads for your business. You can tell people how your products or services are better than others in the market. People who engage with your brand i.e. like, comment, share or follow your brand, you can persuade them to purchase. 

You can run a social media marketing ad campaign to target those customers. By giving offers and discounts you can make encourage people to make a purchase. Add a Facebook shop section or Instagram Shopping feature to your profile to enable people to checkout through the platform itself. 

3. Build relationships with your customers 

By connecting with your customers through social media marketing, you can build lasting relationships. When customers see your posts, you reinforce your brand to them. This creates a  sense of knowingness and encourages them to purchase from you again. 

Social media for business marketing can help you answer your customers’ questions and queries. You can build customers’ trust and make them believe that you value them. You can engage in conversation with customers where they mention you or talk about your brand. 

4. Creates a brand persona

You can use social media for marketing to humanize your brand. You can become an active participant in interactions and conversations. You can communicate with people as if your brand is a human. 

Try to create a friendly and approachable brand persona. You can decide the words that you will use in the conversation with your customers. This will make a huge impact on how customers view your brand. For example, Apple has a competent persona and it positions itself as a technologically advanced & innovative brand. 

The downside of social media marketing 

Social media marketing has many benefits that we have discussed above. However, there are also some downsides to social media marketing. You need to constantly put in the time and effort to build your brand’s social media presence. Marketers need to constantly engage in creating interesting content to engage with prospective customers. 

For effective social media marketing, you need to gain an understanding of distinct social media platforms. You consistently need to keep a check on the performance of these platforms to evaluate if you’re making the right investments. Even, after all this you can’t be sure of the results that you get from social media marketing. 

Moreover, social media marketing platforms constantly alter their algorithms and policies so you need to keep a check on them. Many times customers put their complaints on social media platforms. Thus, you need to be on alert all the time. This can harm the company’s reputation if not handled properly. 

Measuring the effectiveness and ROI of social media marketing channels is difficult. You need to track and analyze multiple metrics and complex data to get a clear understanding of your ROI. Sometimes, social media marketing is all about assumptions that why the customers didn’t like something and why they acted the way they did. 

Nonetheless, social media marketing benefits still overpower its drawbacks. Thus, it’s worth investing in social media marketing strategies. Now, we will discuss how you can create a social media marketing strategy for your business. 

How to create a social media marketing strategy?

Creating a social media marketing plan helps your teams stay on the same page. You can define the work that needs to be done and the team member responsible for it. Below, we have given simple steps following which you can do marketing social media. 

1. Create your buyer personas 

The first step to creating your social media marketing strategy is to understand your target audience. You should know who your prospects are and their needs & wants. Think about their interests and what might entice them towards your business.

You can segment your audience into groups based on their needs. This way you can create personalized content for different segments of your audience. Determining the type of content that your target customers might like will help you gain the right followers. 

For creating buyer personas, you can use tools like Make My Persona Tool and Buyer Persona Templates. 

2. Choose the right marketing platforms 

For conducting social media marketing, you need to decide the marketing platforms where you want to share content. The social media marketing channels that you should choose depends on the type of your business. See on which marketing channels most of your target audience is available. 

You can create awareness about your brand by posting content on the right marketing channels. Tell your prospective customers how your products or services can solve their problems. Try to be present on all social media platforms where your target audience is available. 

3. Decide important metrics and KPIs to track 

To measure the effectiveness of social media marketing, you must track metrics and KPIs. The metrics and KPIs that you choose to track should align with your business goals. For example, if your business goal is to expand your reach. Then, the metric you track should be the impressions of your post. 

Here, we have given a list of metrics that you can track for your social media marketing content. 

These are some of the vital metrics that you can measure to analyze your marketing channel’s performance.

4. Know your competition 

Doing competitor analysis can help you know who your competitors are and what they are doing. An in-depth analysis can help you get an insight into your competitors’ social media marketing strategy. You can know what’s working well and where they’re lacking. It will also help you set the right targets for your social media marketing. 

Have a look at the social media platforms they are using. See which social media platforms they aren’t using and where your audience is underserved. Identify the loopholes in your competitors’ social media marketing strategy. Try to meet those gaps through your social media marketing strategy. 

5. Create unique and interesting content

As you know, the social media marketing world is vast. Every day people come across loads of content on the Internet. How can you make a difference? You can make an impression on people’s minds by creating unique and interesting content. 

Don’t just put focus on promoting your products or services. Try to provide value to people through your content so that they find it worth following you. Create content based on the interest areas of your target customers. You can also conduct contests and giveaways to entice people to come to your website. 

6. Plan and schedule your posts 

Brainstorm ideas for creating a social media marketing plan for one month. Once you have created your social media marketing plan, it’s time to schedule your posts. Webmaxy eGrowth can help you schedule and manage your social media posts from one platform. 

You need to integrate your distinct social media accounts with Webmaxy eGrowth. Next, you can schedule your posts for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. After your social media posts are uploaded, you can check their engagement and metrics in one dashboard. 

You can see which social media marketing campaign is performing the best and worst. Tracking various metrics can help you know which social media platforms you need to pay more attention to. 

7. Analyze your marketing channels performance 

Webmaxy eGrowth can help you know how your different marketing channels are performing. Its marketing insights feature can help you track the conversions you’re getting from distinct social media marketing channels. 

You can see how much revenue you’re generating from each channel. This information can help you make data-driven decisions. You can invest in the right marketing channels which are delivering results. 

Social media marketing: Metrics to measure 

The best way to measure the success of your social media marketing is by tracking if you’re meeting your business goals. You can track various metrics to get an understanding of how close your social media content marketing is to your goals. Below, we have given a list of the 10 most important metrics that you should measure. 

You can influence these metrics, by increasing awareness and improving overall engagement of your posts. To track these metrics, you can use analytics given on social media marketing platforms like Facebook Analytics, Instagram Insights, Twitter Analytics, etc.

Creating engaging social media content: Top ideas for 2023 

Till now we discussed how to create a social media marketing strategy and evaluate your efforts. Here, we will give you some of the best social media marketing content ideas that you can incorporate into your strategy. 

1. Post stories and time-sensitive content 

You might have seen the story feature on Facebook and Instagram. Stories stay on your profile for 24 hours. You can create stories that appear on your followers’ feeds. This way you can create interactive and FOMO (fear of missing out) content. You can give a 24-hour valid offer. 

Stories are a great way to take your followers behind the scene. You can create stories that showcase how you make the best products for them. You can use stories to cover a lot of aspects of your brand without making people leave their comfort zone. 

2. Post short videos 

Videos are a good way to engage with your target audience. As per the statistics, short-form videos are the most engaging type of in-feed social content. You can create different types of videos like informative, entertaining, and testimonials for your prospective customers. You can create a series of videos to make people follow you for updates. Nowadays, creating videos is easy with so many video production and editing tools available. 

3. Humanize your brand 

With your social media marketing strategy, you can humanize your brand. Don’t forget that behind followers there are humans. As per a report, 34% of customers want to see content that shows brand personality. Based on your product features, you can create a brand personality. You can create humanized posts that make people connect with you more. 

4. Collaborate with influencers 

People tend to believe people more than brand claims. Influencers are content creators who post about their lives and whom a lot of people follow. You can collaborate with influencers and ask them to create compelling content about your brand. However, make sure the influencers you collaborate with have your target audience as their following. 

Social media marketing tips 

Social media marketing can benefit you in different ways as we have mentioned above. Now, we will give you marketing tips for social media to build your social media strategy. 

1. Create different types of content 

Content plays an important role when it comes to marketing for social media. You should try to post different types of content to keep it interesting for your audience. You can include images, informative content, how-tos, quick tips, polls, questions, and contests in marketing social media. 

2. Consistency is the key 

With social media marketing, you can’t expect results overnight. You should post regularly and try to be active on different social media platforms. Make sure you keep your brand persona and voice consistent everywhere. Keep it friendly, trustworthy, and light-hearted to make it approachable to people. 

3. Participate in conversations

Don’t keep your social media marketing simple and blunt. Join groups related to your brand to mark your presence and drive new customers. Engage in conversations with people, where you’re mentioned or tagged. Create quizzes and polls to initiate conversations with your prospective customers. Being an active brand on social media makes people believe you’re listening to them. 

4. Repost user generated content 

Sometimes, you can run out of ideas for your social media marketing plan. Then, you can always turn back to user-generated content and repost it. You can create contests and ask people to share about your brand. Then, you can repost the best videos or images on your brand’s social media page. By reposting user-generated content, you can create excitement in people and make them follow you. 

5. Try paid social media marketing

If you want quick results from social media marketing, then you can opt for paid ads. It is a cost-effective way to expand your reach and get more customers. Many social media platforms run paid ads like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. 

You can create good content and put it in front of a large target audience. Most of the social media platforms offer advanced capabilities to help you reach prospective customers. You can select various attributes like age group, geographic location, gender, job profile, etc for showing your ads. 

6. Use analytics to make improvements

To measure the success of your social media marketing, you must track analytics. You can use Webmaxy eGrowth to analyze the performance of your different social media marketing campaigns. You can see which social media post is performing the best with the highest engagement. You can find out which social media is not delivering you results. 

From eGrowth’s marketing insight feature, you can determine the conversions and revenue you’re generating from distinct marketing channels. These insights can help you make data-driven decisions and improve your strategy. 

Best social media marketing service: Webmaxy eGrowth 

Webmaxy eGrowth is an all-in-one eCommerce management platform. It comes with a Social Media Management feature, which allows you to manage your different social media accounts from one place. You can plan and schedule your social media posts for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It unifies the engagement report of these platforms in one dashboard. You can track metrics such as likes, comments, shares, etc. 

You can also analyze the performance of your different marketing campaigns. See how much you’re spending on marketing campaigns and the conversions you’re getting from them. Based on the ROI of marketing channels, you can make the right investments. Additionally, Webmaxy eGrowth comes with tons of features like a KPI dashboard, marketing insights, audience segmentation, marketing automation, email & Whatsapp marketing, customer loyalty, help desk, and retargeting. 

To make your eCommerce management efficient, schedule a Webmaxy eGrowth demo with our experts on call or email us at info@webmaxy.co. 

Social media marketing: The conclusion 

Social media marketing is a great way to reach your target customers where they’re available. Nowadays, social media has become a powerful marketing tool with so many people spending their hours there. To start social media marketing, you should choose the platforms that have the maximum of your target market. Once that’s done, you need to create a social media marketing strategy. 

A good social media marketing strategy is one that incorporates different types of content like images, videos, infographics, blogs, etc. Make sure you create unique and compelling content to attract new audiences and drive sales. Keep track of your social media marketing results to know what’s working and what’s not. A social media marketing solution like Webmaxy eGrowth can help you do that. 

Learn more about Webmaxy eGrowth, schedule a call with our experts, or email us at info@webmaxy.co.