Editor's introduction: In the era of mobile Internet, social media applications have attracted a large number of users, and people's social relationships have changed greatly with this trend, and social media marketing has become the focus of many brands. So, do you understand the definition, types and operational strategies of social media marketing? This article has been interpreted in detail, let's take a look at it together.
In 1929, the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy first proposed the Six Degrees of Sepration in his short story Chains.
The so-called six-degree relationship theory means that all people on the earth can be connected to any other person through a chain of acquaintances within five layers.
Fast forward to 1997 when Andrew Weinreich launched the world's first social networking site, http://SixDgree.com, which connects users based on the six-degree relationship theory. Its birth represents that social networking sites have broken down the barriers of human social networking at the physical level in a strong posture.
In 2000, Six Degrees ceased to serve (although its website was still in use), and many other social media platforms such as Friendster, hi5, LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter emerged, dramatically changing private and public life.
According to global social media statistics for 2021, social media users now spend an average of 2 hours and 25 minutes a day on social networking and messaging apps, while social media users have already crossed the 4.2 billion mark.
With the rapid growth in the value of social media in marketing and commerce, social media marketing that uses social platforms and web sites to promote products or services through paid and unpaid means has begun to become a major marketing buzzword in recent years.
1. What is social media marketing?
Social Media refers to the content production and exchange platform based on user relationships on the Internet, such as: Facebook, Youtobe, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
Two of the most important features of social media:
- The traffic is "amazing": the number of users and viewers is huge.
- Freedom: Its platform has the ability to choose, edit and disseminate spontaneously.
"Marketing" refers to the process by which a company discovers or discovers the needs of prospective consumers, allows consumers to understand the product and then purchase the product.
It can be extended that social media marketing is the act of marketing promotion by enterprises or individuals or institutions on social network platforms.
Wikipedia believes that social media marketing refers to the marketing strategy of enterprises to create specific messages or content on social networking services to attract consumers' attention, attract discussions among online netizens, and encourage netizens to disseminate and disseminate these marketing content through their personal social networks, thereby enhancing the key and satisfaction of customers.
Types and platforms in social media marketing
In a world of more than 7 billion people, 4.2 billion people are active on social media. In this section, we'll cover eight social media platforms that are very important if you want to do effective social media marketing.
1. Facebook
Age: 18-45 years old.
Industries (B2B and B2C): E-Commerce, Retail, Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI), Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), Entertainment, Fashion, Real Estate, News, Health, Sports.
Businesses can use Facebook to share content, engage with customers, run ads, or even use it as a platform to provide customer support.
2. Twitter
Age: 18-45+.
Industries (B2B and B2C): News, Technology, E-Commerce, Retail, Entertainment, Tourism, Sports, Health, Telecommunications, BFSI...
Twitter allows you to express your opinion in 280 characters. Known as a pioneer in the use of hashtags, Twitter is a social media platform for users to share ideas, reach out to brands and celebrities, and consume news and information snippets.
Brands primarily use Twitter for customer service because it is a platform that customers often use for timely brand interactions. For example: learn how Indihome responds to customer complaints and how they project their brand image.
Twitter users tend to be more tech-savvy, so Twitter has become a hub for information discovery. Therefore, B2B and B2C brands should use Twitter to publish their content.
3rd LinkedIn
Age: 25-45 years old.
Industry (most B2B): Legal, BFSI, Technology, Manufacturing, Marketing, Education, Employment.
As a business social platform, LinkedIn LinkedIn unlike other social platforms, most of the users here use LinkedIn LinkedIn to query industry information, exchange ideas, and establish a professional image of individuals or companies. Therefore, LinkedIn LinkedIn customers are of higher quality, more targeted, and the development value is naturally better.
4. Instagram
Age: 18-35 years old.
Industry (B2C): E-Commerce, Fashion, Retail, Food & Beverage, Beauty, Travel, Photography, Entertainment, Real Estate.
Instagram is a mobile-based visual platform that allows you to share images and videos. Instagram's popularity has improved in recent years and is expected to grow even more as consumers continue to prefer vertical video, live video, and stories. Instagram has launched a vertical video platform called IGTV that lets you share videos that last longer than a minute.
If you sell physical products, then you should try shopping on Instagram. This is a great feature that many experts claim is the future of social commerce.
5. YouTube
Age: 18-55 years old.
Industry (B2B and B2C): Almost any industry that can create video content for marketing.
YouTube is an online video sharing platform that lets you view, share, and upload video content. The exponential growth of video marketing has prompted brands to create and share video content widely on YouTube. If you're planning to join YouTube, here are three facts for you to consider:
- YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google;
- Owned by Google;
- If your competitors are already on YouTube, it will be more challenging to make your business brand more compelling.
6. Pinterest
Age: 18-45 years old.
Industry (B2C most): Art, DIY, Craft, Beauty, Fashion, E-Commerce, Architecture, Food, Photography.
Pinterest is an excellent visual platform for individuals and brands seeking artistic inspiration and promoting DIY events. You'll find a lot of ideas about the pin (digital) and board (image collection) forms of a topic.
Although Pinterest was very popular among women in its early days, a change was observed in use in 2016, with female users dropping from 83% to 60%.
Brands can create a business account on Pinterest or run ads to reach their target audience.
7. Snapchat
Industries (B2C most): Health, Fashion, Food & Beverage, Live Events/Concerts, Retail.
Mobile vision platform, known for its short content visibility. Pictures and videos posted on Snapchat disappeared after 24 hours. Snapchat is the most popular social platform among millennial and Gen Z users. Since content is short-lived, Snapchat is great for creating both original and original content. Businesses can also reach a wider audience by placing ads on Snapchat.
8. TikTok
Age: 10-29 years old.
Industry (mainly B2C): Entertainment, fashion, drama, almost any industry that can create compelling video content.
The international version of TikTok is similar to Ins, which is suitable for mobile content dissemination. Because the recommendation mechanism of waterfall stream videos is easier to attract target customers, and TikTok's users are generally generation Z young people, it is more interactive. Among them, the marketing effect of the hashtag challenge is the most prominent.
Third, the practical steps of social media marketing
Step 1: Analyze the characteristics of your target customers
There are two kinds of population characteristics: dominant and invisible.
Dominant characteristics refer to information that can be obtained through mild contact, such as gender, age, occupation, place of origin/country, etc. in population attributes, as well as income, purchasing power, and purchasing channel preferences in consumption characteristics.
Invisible traits refer to those that need to be discovered through in-depth contact, such as personality traits, like home, lively, face control, minimalism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, etc.
After analyzing the customer profile, please use the recommended traffic sources in Google Analytics (or the analysis tool you use) to select the most suitable platform by corresponding the characteristics of the brand's own target customers to the user profiles of different platforms.
You can also use competitor analytics to help you track currently successful content and assess their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to social media. This will help you develop an effective social media strategy for your organization.
Step 2: Set goals and define metrics
Not all platforms are available for every brand. What do you need to determine your purpose?
Is it to increase brand awareness, generate leads, provide customer support or increase brand engagement and impact?
Of course, mere purpose is not enough. You'll also need to identify metrics to accomplish your goals.
For example, if you want to increase brand awareness, the ideal metric is how many followers you'll accumulate over a certain period of time. Give numbers and time frames.
Adopting the SMART (concrete, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound) concept is the ideal way to define goals and metrics.
Step 3: Define a content policy
Your content strategy should be based on your goals and target markets.
You need to identify the main challenges your audience and prospects are facing, and understand how you can address them with content. This forms the basis of the topic selection for your content strategy.
Having a marketing calendar is probably the best idea to automate social media publishing so you don't get lost when it comes to posting content every day.
Step 4: Learn about algorithms on social media
In order to increase the reach of your content, you need to figure out how social media distributes content.
You must know that at some point in time, social media platforms prefer a certain content format.
For example, video content on Facebook has better audience reach than other content. Therefore, you need to create video content on Facebook because it will get better reach compared to text, link, or image posts.
Step 5: Define a paid social media strategy
The reach of most mainstream social channels is decreasing. If you've set a larger goal, you'll need to consider paid social media advertising.
Social media ads help you drive traffic to your website, increase app downloads, generate leads, increase awareness and engagement, and generate sales directly through different types of ads.
Based on your goals, set a budget and plan a campaign that outlines each campaign budget, target audience, campaign objective, ad format, and bid strategy.
Step 6: Monitor, measure, and optimize
Once the campaign starts, you need to constantly monitor your social media activity. Keep track of which methods work, stop activities that don't work or are just a waste of time.
Most social media learning comes from experimentation, so don't be discouraged if certain activities don't produce any results. You should continue to modify your method until you reach the right point.
Of course, the target customers, social media platforms one by one data analysis, planning social media promotion cooperation is very costly to consume human resources, Chinese enterprises go overseas to do marketing is a barrier to communication, so it is also a good choice to cooperate with the marketing team with overseas KOL resources.
This article was originally published by @Inpander To The Sea and is published by Everyone is a product manager, and reprinting without permission is prohibited.
The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol.