Social Media Marketing Tutorial
Social Media Marketing (SMM) uses various social media platforms to connect with the audience. Some most important social media platforms are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Google+, Starbucks, and Snapchat. We use these social media platforms to connect with people, promote our business, increase sales, and create awareness about the products as well as services.
In our social media marketing tutorial, we are going to discuss the following topics –
- What is Social Media?
- What is Social Media Marketing?
- Why Social Media Marketing?
- Laws of Social Media Marketing
- Social Media Marketing Platform
- Advantages of Social Media Marketing
- Disadvantages of Social Media Marketing
- Social Media Marketing Strategy
- Social Media Marketing tools
- Difference between Social Media Optimization (SMO) and Social Media Marketing (SMM)
What is Social Media?
Social Media is a trendy way of electronic communication through which we can create our online communication sites to share information, images, ideas, audios, videos, and other content with our friends, business partners, relatives, as well as customers.
In simple words, we can say that social media is all about establishing communication between marketers and customers.
There are the following three Social Media Classification tools –
1. Social Publishing
Social publishing allows us to publish information in the content form(written text and videos).
Example: Blog, YouTube.
2. Social Networking
Social Networking helps us to stay connected with our friends, business partners, relatives, and customers.
Example: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook
3. Photo-based Social Networking
Photo-based social networking is used to share photos using social networking sites.
Example: Pinterest, Snapchat, Instagram
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Marketing is a platform through which we can present our business in front of the audience. It is mainly used to promote our business, increase website traffic, customer engagement, brand awareness, and other marketing goals by creating various forms of content (videos, blogs, infographics, etc.) in various social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
The main goal of using social media marketing is to increase the website’s traffic, increase likes, comments, and shares.
Why Social Media Marketing?
There are the following reasons to use Social Media Marketing –
- Social Media Marketing helps us to improve product visibility and brand awareness.
- Social Media Marketing uses various social media marketing platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat to reach the target audience.
- It offers cost-effective techniques to grow our business.
- It helps us to improve search engine ranking.
- It helps us to enhance brand authority.
- Social Media Marketing provides an opportunity to gain new customer insights.
- It helps us to increase top-funnel traffic.
- It helps us to generate new leads.
Laws of Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing focuses on the following laws to promote business and increase product awareness:
1. The Law of Focus
A highly-focused social media marketing strategy helps us to reach the target audience. A successful marketer mainly focused on improving the value of the product that he offers to his customers.
2. The Law of Listening
If you want to achieve success in social media marketing and content marketing, then always try to listen to audience requirements rather than speaking.
3. The Law of Quality
As we all know, Quality is always better than Quantity, which means it is better to deal with 1000 online customers who frequently read our content and share our content with their own audiences, not for those 10,000 online customers who read our content only once and never share it with others.
4. The Law of Patience
In Social Media Marketing, success does not happen overnight, so we have to keep patience as well as work hard and wait for the right time to achieve success.
5. The Law of Compounding
The law of compounding helps us to share content with multiple audiences on different social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. It also includes an ability that if any user who likes our posts on Facebook then he or she can also share this post on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest that’s why it creates more access point for the audience to find the relevant content.
6. The Law of Influence
Spend time to search online influencers in the market and try to connect and build a relationship with them because they are most demandable in the market. Always try to connect and make a strong bond with that Influencer who takes an interest in your products and businesses to increase your followers as well as shares.
7. The Law of Value
If we share our products and services regularly on the social media then there may be a chance that customers are not interested in our products and services, so we should have to pay more attention to produce the relevant content because the appropriate and effective contents help us to improve the value of the product.
8. The Law of Acknowledgment
According to the law of acknowledgment, never ignore someone who reached out to us to build a relationship with the audience.
9. The Law of Accessibility
In Social media platforms, do not publish content that you want to remove from social media platforms after some time. Make sure that valuable and relevant content should always be available to your target audience. Always try to be available to your audience to publish valuable content, solve their queries, and participate in conversations; otherwise, the audience can easily replace you with others.
Social Media Marketing Platforms
Social Media Marketing includes various social media platforms to reach new customers, promote their business, create brand awareness, and increase sales.
Some most common social media platforms that we frequently used in social media marketing are given below –
1. Facebook
Daily active users – 1.45 billion
Monthly active users – 2.20 billion
Facebook is the best social media marketing platform, which is founded by Mark Zuckerberg on February 4, 2004. It allows us to invite and connect with our friends, relatives, colleagues, and customers by sending them messages, images, audios, and videos. It also allows us to like and comment on the posts, which are shared by them.
Most of the small as well as large organizations use Facebook as a “center” of their social media marketing. Organizations use Facebook to promote their brand, create awareness about their product, and reach out to a wider audience. Facebook also helps the audience to see our latest content, our working hours, write their reviews on a particular product, and also see our organization’s location on a map.
There are the following advantages of using the Facebook platform for social media marketing –
- Facebook helps us to easily reach the targeted audience.
- It allows us to share budget-friendly ads to the audience.
- Using Facebook, we can learn and use a new market strategy at a low cost.
- It provides various marketing platforms.
- It allows organizations to communicate with clients.
2. Twitter
Daily active users – 145 million
Monthly active users – 320 million
Twitter is one of the most effective, popular, and fast-paced social media marketing platform created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, and launched in July 2006. It is an SMS-based communication platform, which allows registered users to read and write small messages called “tweets.” Using Twitter, marketers can easily reach hundreds and thousands of customers to share the latest news and promote their brand. The main disadvantage of using twitter is that we can use only use 280 characters for the message.
There are the following advantages of using the Twitter platform –
- It helps us to increase customer satisfaction.
- It allows us to continuously send information in the form of small messages called “tweets.”
- It helps us to establish a stronger relationship with customers.
- It improves organic search engine ranking.
- It is a very efficient platform for gathering feedback from customers.
3. Instagram
Daily active users – 500 million
Monthly active users – 800 million
Instagram is maintained by Facebook. It is an effective tool to reach the audience and allows the marketer to share images, memes, and videos to promote their business. According to a survey, 80% of accounts follow a business on Instagram. It works flawlessly on mobile phones and tablets. Recently Instagram introduces a new feature that is shared stories every day. This feature helps marketers to easily update their customers about new products on a daily basis.
There are the following reasons to use Instagram platform –
- Instagram’s Global rank (Worldwide rank) is 5th on the internet.
- Instagram helps marketers to enhance their branding.
- It is a marketer-friendly platform.
- It helps marketers to drive traffic and grow their business.
- It helps marketers to acquire customers easily.
- On Instagram, content is available in the form of images and videos, which helps customers to understand the product in a very simple way.
- Instagram’s brand engagement and visual content are ten times higher than Facebook.
4. LinkedIn
No. of registered users – 562 million
Monthly active users – 303 million
LinkedIn is the best B2B (Business 2 Business) social media marketing platform, which was founded in 2002. It allows us to create profiles as a fresher or as a professional. It is a place that helps us to search for jobs, stay connected with professionals, recruit new employees, and discuss business ideas with experienced employees to promote our business. A company profile on LinkedIn not only helps us to generate the local leads but also helps us to draw global leads.
There are the following reasons which make LinkedIn as a very effective platform for social media marketing –
- It provides an opportunity to stay updated about new technologies.
- It helps us to display and update our resume to search for new job opportunities.
- It is a free platform that mainly focused on career development.
- It helps to build and promote business brands.
- It is used to generate more leads.
5. Pinterest
Monthly active users – 320 million
Daily active users – 120 million
Pinterest is a combination of the two words “Pin” (Thumbtack) and “Interest” (Interesting). It is quite different from all other social media marketing platforms. It is an image-pinning website introduced in 2009. Currently, Pinterest becomes one of the largest visual social networks to share and discover ideas, images, recipes, videos, new brands, infographics, and more.
There are the following reasons to use Pinterest for social media marketing –
- Pinterest is the fastest-growing platform for online content distribution.
- It is mostly used to create brand awareness and increase website leads.
- Its user-friendly platform allows us to create a visual profile for business and publish news.
- Its visual-heavy social network helps us to build more traffic on our website at a low cost.
Note: pins are the ideas that users on Pinterest create, find, and save from the browser.
6. YouTube
No. of daily active users – 1 billion
No. of monthly active users – 2 billion
YouTube is an excellent free video-sharing platform for social media marketing. It was created in 2005. YouTube helps us to create and upload our videos on the valuable content and deliver it to the audience in the form of tutorials. YouTube is like a platform where we can show our talent to attract the audience. In YouTube, content mainly available in the form of Podcasts, Infographics, Presentations, and video series.
There are the following advantages of YouTube in social media marketing –
- YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine and the 3rd most visited website.
- It is the best and easiest way to learn new technologies.
- It helps us to promote and sell our products worldwide.
- It is completely free to use and helps to acquire qualified traffic.
- It will expose you to connect with a huge audience.
Note: YouTube is a mixture of both social media marketing and content marketing. 7. Snapchat
No. of daily active users – 210 million
No. of monthly active users – 360 million
Snapchat is a great platform for adults. It is free to download. It allows us to create a new type of social media on a network. Snapchat mobile app is used to share photos, videos, and doubles as messaging services for users. It is most known due to the fact that messages and content disappear on it. Users can either send the content directly to another user or upload this content as their “story,” which is viewable to users till the next 24 hours.
There are the following reasons to use Snapchat in social media marketing –
- It allows us to share and collect snaps from specific events to create stories on the social media platform.
- It is used to add a filter on photos to make them more attractive.
- It allows customers to interact with other experienced customers to know about the pros and cons of a product.
- Using Snapchat, customers can directly communicate with companies.
- It is a user-friendly platform for newcomers.
8. Google+
No. of registered users – 2 billion
No. of monthly active users – 395 million
Google+ was a powerful social media marketing tool, which was developed by Google. It helped us to improve our local search visibility, build relationships with customers, and other businesses.
There are the following advantages of using Google+ in social media marketing –
- Google+ allows us to follow other people.
- It allows us to share information, images to target customers.
- It helps us to find other people with similar interests.
9. Starbucks
No. of daily active users – 10 million
No. of monthly active users – 19 million
Starbucks is one of the engaging brands on Facebook. The main objective of introducing Starbucks is that it helps to build an online community of loyal fans and engage with them.
Recently, Starbucks introduced a strategy to launch new variants of its existing products based on consumer’s suggestions on their Facebook page, so customers not only enjoy the clicks-ins, photographs put by marketers but can also enjoy live audiences on Facebook.
10. TikTok
No. of daily active users – 150 million
No. of monthly active users – 300 million
TikTok is one of the best social media marketing platforms launched in 2018. It is a popular video streaming and sharing app which allows us to create and share a 15-second video on a particular topic.
There are the following reasons to use TikTok for social media marketing –
- It targets a huge audience in the easiest way.
- It creates better user engagement.
- It allows us to create a small video and share it with their followers to get more likes and comments to grow our business.
- Recently, Tiktok launches its own advertising platform to advertise business using Tiktok ads. Now, Tiktok advertisement becomes the best platform for producing and launching new products as well as services.
Advantages of Social Media Marketing
As we know that social media marketing is an excellent way for us to grow our business. It is a platform, which is used by Businessmen, students, Private organizations, and Government organizations.
Some most popular advantages of Social Media Marketing are given below –
1. Increase Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is one of the most important advantages of social media marketing. Social media marketing uses various social media platforms to aware of the audience related to a particular product, company, and website.
2. Generates more inbound traffic on websites
If we do not use social media marketing, then we can only reach our regular customers, but when we use social media marketing, then we are able to reach millions of customers easily. Social Media Marketing also helps us to generate more inbound traffic on our websites. As we know, getting more traffic on websites or blogs helps us to earn money.
3. Helps us to reach a large audience
Social media marketing uses social media platforms to connect with millions of active audiences, so social media is a great opportunity for us to reach the audience who are interested in our products and services.
The percentage rate of U.S audience who use social media platforms are given below –
- Facebook: 68%
- Twitter: 24%
- Instagram: 35%
- YouTube: 73%
- LinkedIn: 25%
- Pinterest: 29%
- Snapchat: 27%
4. Improve Brand Loyalty & Customer engagement
According to the research, online marketing engages with the millions of customers on the social media platform and enjoy better brand loyalty from their audience through social media marketing.
Marketers generally follow the following three steps to improve brand loyalty –
- Listen to Customers
- Promote Customers Reviews
- Think like your customer
5. Makes our customers Up-To-Date
Social media marketing offers the easiest way to make our customers updated about the release of new products, services, or upcoming events. Most Up-to-date customers generally take more interest in your website and businesses.
6. Cost-efficient
Social Media Marketing is cost-effective because creating a new user profile, and signing is free for almost every social media marketing platform.
7. Improve Search Engine Ranking
Sharing posts on social media helps the audience to reach our website, which is very important for the success of our website to increase the traffic and create backlinks. According to Search Engine Optimization Techniques, Backlinks are more important for us to improve the search engine ranking. When both traffic and backlinks increase on our website, then our website will appear at the top rank of a search engine, which helps us to grow our business faster.
8. Faster and Easier Communication
Social Media Marketing completely changes the way of communication with the audience. Now, more than 2.8 billion users use social media marketing platforms to communicate with marketers. Social Media platforms help customers to reach marketers easily and share their requirements with them that what they actually want.
Disadvantages of Social Media Marketing
Although there is no shortage of social media marketing, there are definitely some risks in it. If you always shared positive comments and post relevant and informative content on it, then you will never have any problem with this.
Some common disadvantages of Social Media Marketing are given below –
1. Time-consuming
Time is the major issue in social media marketing because every startup takes a lot of time to expand the business.
2. Receives negative feedback from the audience
The audience shares both their positive and negative experience in the social media platform, which is visible to all other audiences.
3. Needs qualified personnel
To focus on business issues, we have to recruit qualified personnel to manage our business accounts and traffic. This implies that we have to spend more money to hire them.
4. Exposure to competitors
Social media marketing allows us to take research on our competitor’s strategy. However, your competitors can still connect with your business methodology through your social media marketing platform.
Social Media Marketing Strategy
Social Media Marketing Strategy is all about the plan that every marketer executes to achieve customer satisfaction and generates more leads.
1. Set the objectives/goals
First, set the objective that you want to achieve using Social Media Marketing. In general, there are the following 9 goals that every social media marketer wants to achieve:
- Increase brand awareness
- Generate new leads
- Grow revenue by increasing sales or signups
- Generate traffic to our website
- Boost band engagement
- Build a community around the business
- Offers social customer services
- Increase mentions in the press
- Listen to conversations about your brand
2. Know everything about your target audience
Once you define your objective, then know about your audience that what they want to see on a social media platform, which type of content they generally like and share. This strategy helps you to know about your potential fans, customers, and followers that you really want to achieve and need.
There are the following things that you should know about your audience –
- Who are they? (Example: their age, gender, location, interest, etc.)
- In which field they are interested? (Example: Entertainment, content, case studies, education, electronics, etc.)
- In which social media platform, they are generally online? (Example: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and more)
- How do they consume the content? (Example: read social media posts, watch videos, etc.)
For example, more than 75% of teenagers are on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.
3. Research the competition
Research your competitor’s social medial marketing activity every day to reach the audience. Spend most of the time to research the following questions –
- What kind of content are they publishing?
- In which platform they are most active?
- What hashtags do they use?
- What is the tone of their voice?
- What type of communication they have with their target audience?
- How much time they generally spend on social media platforms?
You can also conduct a competitive analysis to understand what your competitors are doing to target the audience and expand their industry.
4. Select the right social media platform for audience
We should have to analyze which social media platform is the most valuable for our business, which social media platform is the most effective for our audience, and where our target audience hags out.
5. Set brand guidelines
It is one of the most important steps for social media marketing strategy.
There are the following social media marketing brand guidelines –
- Brand voice
- Use of emojis
- Use of hashtags
- Protocol on interacting with the audience
- Banned words/topics
6. Build your initial presence
Building an initial presence includes a small introduction about your business, which mainly includes small business information, a few images, and our first post to target the audience.
There are the following steps include in the stage of initial presence –
- Enter business information – It includes an overview of your business, contact details, and link to your website.
- Upload images – It includes a recognizable profile image such as a logo. Always remember that image is designed in the proper size and responsible for both desktop and mobile views.
- Create your first post – It is the most visible page for your audience, so always create this page more interactive and good looking.
- Follow your contacts – First, start following with those loyal customers who frequently like and follow your account and posts to grow your business.
7. Plan the type of content that you want to share with your audience
Content is one the most effective way to achieve our objectives on social media platforms, so always plan to share effective, valuable, informative, and high-quality content with your audience.
There are the following various types of content are available on the social media platforms –
- Photos
- Videos
- Graphics
- Articles
- Livestreams
- Stories
8. Create a social media content calendar
A content calendar helps us to see how frequently we are publishing content for our audience.
9. Run Advertisements on the social media platform to promote your products and services
All social media platforms allow us to run various advertisements (paid as well as unpaid) on social media to increase the size of our business and audience.
There are the following types of ads that you run on the social media platform –
- Storewide discounts – It allows the audience to select and purchase products as well as services at a discounted price.
- New product promotions – The main aim to run these ads is to aware the audience about newly released products.
- New customer deals – It is designed to encourage the audience to purchase their products from your site.
- Events/Webinar promotions – It is used to invite the audience to join your events to increase their attention.
10. Test and evaluate your results
You can evaluate the use of a social media platform based on the following parameter –
- Followers/Likes – It is used to analyze the size of our social media audience.
- Reach – It displays how many people seeing your social media posts.
- Engagements – It shows the number of Likes, comments, and shares that we received on our content.
- Clicks – It shows the number of clicks that we received on our post.
Social Media Marketing Tools
Social Media Marketing uses various social media management tools. A list of most commonly used social media marketing tools are given below –
1. SocialOomph
SocialOomph helps us to automate a number of business tasks across social media platforms. Using SocialOomph, you can also manage your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn activities in one place.
Click on the below link to sign up with SocialOomph.
Website: https://www.socialoomph.com/
2. PostPlanner
PostPlanner is used to schedule Facebook updates, which helps us to increase customer engagement on social media platforms. Its beautiful features help marketers to get 660% more customer engagement than any other social media marketing tools. In short, we can say that it is the best tool for those marketers who only want to increase their customer engagement.
The main advantage of using PostPlanner is that it allows us to select the best content according to the star rating. As we all know, better star rating brings more customer engagement.
Click on the below link to sign up with PostPlanner.
Website: https://www.postplanner.com/
3. Agorapulse
Agorapulse is the best social marketing tool in the current market era. It mainly focuses on the audience, customer engagement, and brand awareness.
It includes the following features such as:
Social media inbox
Social media inbox helps us to check all social media updates. It is also used with email accounts to check regularly updated notifications and all incoming messages in the inbox.
Publishing and scheduling
Publishing and scheduling is the biggest feature of agorapulse. Using this, we can publish our posts on any network and schedule them.
Monitoring
Monitoring is used to monitor our social media platforms, create and search certain keywords on Twitter, and monitor hashtags on Instagram.
Click on the below link to sign up with Agorapulse.
Website: https://www.agorapulse.com/
4. Chattypeople
Chattypeople.com is one of the most important social media marketing tools, which is used to publish on-demand promotions and offers to our customers via Facebook. Chattypeople is also compatible with Messengers. It is suitable for both small as well as large organizations to create a simple chatbot for monetizing Facebook Ads and manage Customer Management System (CMS) automatically using AI. The advantage of using Chattypeople is that it does not require the knowledge of coding to create a chatbot.
Chattypeople supports the following CMS platforms:
- Customer Support
- EShop with Shopify
- Food and restaurants
- Campaign management
- Delivery engine
Click on the below link to sign up with Chattypeople.
Website: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/chattypeople
5. Canva
Canva is one of the best-known social media marketing tools. It is available for free to use. It is mostly used to create images for social media posts. It creates images by using multiple templates, fonts, and colors.
Click on the below link to sign up with Canva.
Website: https://www.canva.com/
6. Buffer
Buffer is the publishing tool, which helps us to publish content on social networks to increase the customer’s engagement. It works on various social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. It is mainly designed for businesses to schedule social media posts, analyze performance, and manage their accounts in one place.
The advantage of using Buffer is that it integrates with Pablo, which helps us to easily create images and share with the audience to increase traffic and customer engagement.
Click on the below link to sign up Buffer.
Website: https://buffer.com
7. Brand24
It is a simple, effective, and web-based social media marketing tool. It is used to analyze keywords and monitors the length and breadth of the Internet for particular keywords.
We can opt Brand24 using the following plans
- Personal Plus at $49
- Professional Premium at $99
- Professional Business at $499
Click on the following link to sign up for the Brand24 website.
Website: https://brandcom24/
Difference between Social Media Optimization (SMO) and Social Media Marketing (SMM)
The below table shows the difference between Social Media Optimization (SMO) and Social Media Marketing (SMM):
| Social Media Optimization (SMO) | Social Media Marketing (SMM) |
|---|---|
| Social Media Optimization (SMO) is an on-page activity done on the website to improve traffic, page ranking, and more. | Social Media Marketing (SMM) is an off-page activity that is implemented by marketers on the various social media channels. |
| It optimizes the content in a way that particular content is easily searchable. | It is used to generate business leads and traffic on our website. |