Social Media Marketing 101
With the explosion of social media channels, this is where the eyeballs are today.
Once your fast, responsive website is live and you've full played out Search Marketing, the next big game is Social Media Marketing. It literally exploded over the past decade and now consumes a significant portion of potential consumers online time that had previously been spent surfing the search engines. With that loss of time in the search engines, it's critical for online business to follow the eyeballs to continue marketing their products and services.
After deciding which social media channels best match the broad B2C or B2B target market, the next step is to create the corresponding business pages on their platforms. This social media strategy needs to define the posting topics, imagery and strict, frequent schedules. All of which are part of how the "brand" is to be presented socially (market leader, eco-friendly, responsive, trustworthy). While the primary long-term goal is to drive conversions on the website, the main short-term goal is to increase post "shares" and followers to the brand business page on each social channel.
Advanced Social Media Marketing 401
Fact: Only about 5% of followers every see your social post. Maybe.
With each passing year, the organic "reach" of each social media business page post declines with changes to each channel's news-feed algorithm. It is usually a shock to new social media business users that their hard-written posts are only "seen" by 5% of their followers. And, "seen" means they most-likely just scrolled by the post in passing without reading it. Real "engagement" is much lower. In essence, these social media channels are driving businesses to pay to reach their own followers, as well as reach new potential followers.
An important component of any successful social media marketing strategy is paid post "boosting" and display advertising. Luckily, these social media channels provide tracking tools that can be installed on the website to monitor social media visitors and their conversions in order to determine the return-on-investment of these advertising campaigns. Unlike search marketing, the social campaigns aren't chasing search keywords but are crafted for specific target markets combining interests, professions and demographics. These highly targeted campaigns can be quite powerful at driving new customer conversions.