Social media marketing, a crucial component of a digital marketing strategy, is a form of online marketing that involves creating and sharing content across various social media platforms keeping in tune with the marketing goals. It involves sharing varied formats of content in the form of images and videos across social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn in order to drive engagement by interacting with the audience and in turn, boosting the followers.
The mere act of creating a social media page or profile would do no wonders. The key is to effectively market using social media, interaction and engagement. The social networks you choose to be on will entirely depend on the industry you and your target audience are in.
You need to start interacting with your audience on these social media platforms by liking, commenting, or sharing your content and most importantly, getting your content out there for your audience to see. The type of content you share and post must be relevant to your industry.
Always be aware of the platform and its conventions when posting social content.
For instance, for people running a B2B business, the most relevant network for to be present on would be LinkedIn since you’re a part of the largest professional network in the world that connects you to other business professionals. For people indulged in the interior design industry, you might want to share your crafts or be active in lifestyle platforms like Pinterest or Instagram, which is where your expected audience is most of the time based on their interests.
Social media is a powerful marketing tool that has become one of the main sources of marketing for businesses of all sizes to reach their prospects and customers. Based on statistics, there are 3.78 billion social media users and is projected to grow to 4.41 billion users by 2025.
Great marketing on social media leads to success by building an empire of loyal brand advocates that even leads to driving leads and sales for your business.
Why engage in social media marketing?
One of the major principles of marketing is inbound marketing, that is bringing customers to your end. Your ideal customers might be using social media, hence you must try your best to build an online social media presence that could tempt your potential customers.
It is with social media platforms that can aid you in creating a community around your brand by building brand awareness, establishing yourself as the industry expert, and also showing your audience that you’re a progressive brand that is enjoyable to interact with, which results in converting prospects to customers that wish to acquire your services.
What is social media advertising?
Social media advertising also referred to as paid social involves running paid ads on various social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
Social media advertising commonly include native ads, banner ads, boost posts, or to like campaigns. They often run on a Pay-per-click system or cost-per-impression payment basis.
You can utilize social media advertising to promote content such as blogs, whitepapers, or a “How-to guide” that your company has created. You can also choose to develop your ad around the content you’re offering or to maximize your reach by boosting the post to increase the chances of your content reach, which in turn will generate website traffic and conversions of visitors to potential leads
Social media advertising (also known as paid social) involves running paid ads on various social media channels, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc. These can include banner ads as well as native ads and activities like boosting posts or like campaigns. Social media ads are often charged on a pay-per-click (PPC) or cost-per-impression basis.
You can use paid social to promote content, like a whitepaper or guide that your company or marketing agency has created. You can develop an ad around this content you’re offering, or boost the posts where you shared the content offer. This increases the reach of your content, which can lead to more website traffic and conversions of visitors to leads.
Why do paid social?
Why do paid social? The answer is targeting.
Usually, with paid social media posts, it doesn’t generate much reach on its own and is unlikely to gain much organic traction. With paid social, you aim to target specific audiences only and it also depends on the platform you’re doing the targeting on, you can target audiences by several determining factors, such as:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Search history
- Interests
- Activities
- Sites they most frequent
- The device used to access apps
- The company they work for
- Their job title and more
Since you’re paying by the number of clicks or impressions (number of views) your ad gets, you want to make sure you’re maximizing your potential from your social media ad budget which means you want to target only the most relevant people to see your ads. This is why paid social is a high-ROI advertising strategy for your marketing campaign, which ensures that only the most relevant people (aka, your ideal customers) see your ads. This makes paid social a high-ROI advertising strategy.
In addition, social media analytics today enables brands to understand more and go in-depth about their audience. It also saves time as it points brands and their marketing efforts in the right direction for more reach, to increase their engagement, and to generate their ROI.
Social Media Marketing vs. Social Media Advertising
Essentially, advertising is a form of marketing that uses advertisements, which are paid notices that appear on public platforms. Not all marketing is advertising, but all advertising is marketing.
When we talk about social media marketing vs. social media advertising, however, we’re generally making a distinction between paid and unpaid methods of marketing using social media. Social media advertising refers to the paid methods (like PPC ads) and social media marketing the unpaid methods (like your social media posts and shares).
