What is Social Media Marketing?
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What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing (SMM) is a method of internet marketing that uses popular social media apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, TikTok, Instagram among others as a marketing tool.
The objective of social media platforms is to utilize brands to connect with the audiences and grow traffic to increase sales.
Role of Social media marketing for small business growth
Social media marketing (SMM) is considered as the modern way to improve and grow a small business and create awareness among audiences.
Social media advertising or influencer marketing is the method of promoting brand awareness.
SMM strategies allows a small business to promote products and services and generate leads by acquiring a follower base.
SMM requires patience, consistency and persistence to reach the objective.
How to do a smart social media marketing plans?
There are approximately 270 million active social media users in the U.S as of January 2022.
To be successful in social media marketing it is important to get your business in front of customers and develop brand loyalty with an effective social media marketing strategy.
Without an effective marketing strategy in place, such as posting rich and powerful user friendly or user engagement contents consistently, it is going to be difficult to make your marketing campaign a success.
If you are not experienced in social media marketing then you’re not alone. Over 90% of small businesses struggle with these common social media challenges.
That is why it is important to hire successful social media marketers like Neil Patel who shares how to make social media work for your small business.
Benefits of using social media marketing plans in a small business
Improve Organic visibility
Social media platforms send signals to Google (and other search engines) to ensure that popular content is shared and visible.
It means that social media also affects your site’s SEO.
Google states that social media shares, likes and backlinks are not direct ranking signals.
-Improve your brand
There are various ways and strategies that social media marketing can help improve brand recognition and loyalty.
You will need active, engaged, and loyal followers for social media to be effective.
Google’s algorithm such as likes and comments will not bring end results if sales and revenue are the ultimate goals of your marketing campaign.
However, through numerical increases in website traffic and proper use of High Domain Authority (DA) backlinks can create greater brand awareness.
-Engage the user audience
You need to engage your user audience by writing creative and valuable content.
Find out the trends and write contents that are thought provoking from the audience’s perspective.
There are 11 steps to engage audiences using social media.
-Impact sales and conversion rates
Social media offers a unique and user rich platform for a brand and company to engage with their customers and this feature makes social media marketing an important part of the overall marketing campaign.
There are 9 Ways to Boost Your Social Media Conversion Rate.
-Improve SERP presence.
Jonathan Aufray of Growth Hackers shares that Social media brings more traffic to your search engine optimized pages, improving both your social media visibility and your engagement.
Michael Anderson of GeoJango Maps shares that If you’re targeting with the contents that are relevant to the right audience then they will stay on your website longer which also boosts website traffic.
Cost of doing social media marketing plans for a small business
According to Sociallybuzz, it is recommended that around 10-25% should be budgeted in social media marketing expenses.
Importance of Facebook marketing for a small business
It is estimated that Facebook has more than 2.91 billion active monthly users which makes it a major platform for small businesses to use to increase sales and revenue.
Most businesses can set up a Facebook Business Page for free which can connect businesses with customers.
Brands can offer key information about their business, products, services, and many other programs and events.
Just for your information, Facebook’s business tools used to be offered under the umbrella as Business Facebook.
However, these tools are now called Meta for Business, as it reflects the company’s new branding image.
Importance of Linkedin as a social media platform for small businesses
LinkedIn is a popular and older social media marketing platform for a small business to grow their business.
Linkedin is more ideal at professional level networking which makes it ideal for small business entrepreneurs to connect with other businesses and business professionals.
ThriveHive shares 20 Ways to Use LinkedIn For Small Businesses.
Linkedin allows merchants and vendors to use content and text-based marketing methods to reach out to their audience groups.
Forbes shares why small businesses should focus on social media marketing.
According to Sprout Social, LinkedIn generates 277% more leads on average which is more than Facebook marketing.
Importance of Instagram for small business
Instagram helps businesses engage with customers effectively.
Engaging your audience with social media strategies using rich content and backlink strategies should be a primary marketing goal.
Instagram is an excellent engagement platform to reach potential audiences. With Instagram, you can engage customers daily by sharing their feedback and opinions.
According to The Motley Fool, Instagram has 600 million active users, 400 million daily active users and 80 million daily active users in the US alone.
71% of US businesses use Instagram to promote their brands and market their products and services.
Instagram is more popular for its influencers. It is best to understand the Instagram demographic data which is shared by Hootsuite.
Three Social Media Marketing Plans and Strategies
There are three main purposes for marketing your business on social media, and if you don’t have them, your strategy will fall apart.
There are 3 key elements. Lead Generation, Lead Nurture , and Lead Conversion. If you don’t have those, your business will >>>Read more
Facts on how Social Media helps in business growth?
-Social media is used by 85% of the world’s population which is approximately 4.74 billion users.
-Facebook is the largest social media platform accounting to 2.91 billion monthly active users as of 2023.
-YouTube with 2.56 billion monthly active users and Whatsapp with 2 billion monthly active users are in second and third place respectively.
Social media platform stats in the world as of 2023 in terms of monthly active users (MAUs):
| Social Media Platform | Number of Users |
| 2.91 billion | |
| Youtube | 2.56 billion |
| 2 billion | |
| 1.47 billion | |
| 1.26 billion | |
| Tik Tok | 1 billion |
| Facebook Messenger | 988 million |
| Douyin | 600 million |
| 574 million | |
| Sina Weibo | 573 million |
| Kuaishou | 573 million |
| Snapchat | 557 million |
| Telegram | 550 million |
| 444 million | |
| 436 million | |
| 430 million | |
| Quora | 300 million |
Source: Demand Sage, Inc.
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