Did you know that 77.9% of the UK population are active on social media?

Social media can be overwhelming for many. With so many platforms and trends to keep on top of, plenty of companies find it hard to master social media marketing.

However, with social media playing such a crucial role in business, you can’t afford to miss out on this opportunity. For brand awareness, advertising your products online is the top goal for most marketers.

But what exactly is social media marketing? What are the benefits? Are there different types? How can I use social media for my business?

These are questions that business owners are always asking, so we decided to create this guide to social media marketing to help them build a strategy and market their specific business. So, let’s get started.

What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is the process of using social media platforms to promote your business by creating content. You will share content that engages with your target audience to build a community, with the end goal of driving traffic to your business, turning leads into customers.

What Are The Most Common Social Media Platforms?

The online space is constantly evolving, with new platforms becoming more popular each year through new updates and features. They are fighting for your business and using new methods to draw users in. Here are the most common platforms right now:

Platform	Users	Type
Facebook	1.9 billion daily active users	Best for advertising and brand awareness
TikTok	1 billion daily active users	Best for creative, short-form content
Instagram	1 billion monthly active users	Best for higher quality videos and images
Twitter	211 million daily active users worldwide	Best for community building and customer service
Snapchat	306 million daily active users	Best for advertising and brand awareness
LinkedIn	774 million active users	Best for building B2B relationships
YouTube	315 million daily active users	Best for videos and long-form content
Pinterest	444 million monthly active users	Best for visual advertising

What Are The Benefits of Social Media Marketing?

With so many active users, you can see that there is huge potential for your business to reach a massive audience. But there are many more benefits to consider too. Below are some reasons why you should invest your time into it.

Brand awareness	There is potential to increase your brand awareness by having a social media presence. By engaging with your audience through comments, shares and likes, you’ll see a huge boost to your brand awareness.
Build a community with customers	Building a community and space online will help your brand create long-lasting relationships with customers. This can be through interacting with comments and answering questions on posts.
Generate leads	Promoting your brand is a simple way to generate leads and boost conversions. Your audience has chosen to follow your account for a reason, so engage with them by running contests and offering rewards by signing up through your channels.
Competitor analysis	A valuable tool is seeing how your competitors interact online. See what tactics they use and how they promote their products. Think about what is working for them and ways you can improve. Also, pair up your account to theirs and see what stands out.
Brand insights	Most platforms have built-in analytics tools to help monitor how well your content is performing. See which method has the biggest engagement and reach, as well as which points don’t perform as well. Tweak your content accordingly to reach optimal levels.

What Are Different Types of Social Media Marketing?

For each platform, there are several different ways that you can market your content. Each one will vary depending on your type of business as well as which channel you decide to use. Some of the most common types are:

Influencer marketing
Content marketing
Advertisement
Sponsorship

For those that are serious about channel growth, you have to be creative to engage your prospects and develop leads. This can be done by maximising current trends and trial and error. Find out which type works best for each platform to get the best results.

What Are The Core Pillars of Social Media Marketing?

By concentrating your efforts and budget on marketing, there is an increased chance of bringing in potential customers that have access to a social media account. Oh, and there are more than 4.48 billion of them. So what are the core pillars to help you thrive?

A solid strategy

The backbone of your online presence is a solid strategy. Going in without any ideas will waste time and resources. You’ll be more likely to reach your goals with a proper strategy.

But what does a good content strategy consist of?

Well, you want to focus it around reaching the right people, with the right content and at the right time. Sounds easy, but planning makes this task a lot less stressful. To achieve this, you should

Engage with your community
Produce valuable content
Improve conversion rates

Having clear goals and a specific plan in place is a good method, but they need to be measurable. This could be reaching a certain amount of followers by a certain date, or replying to a set number of comments per day.

These benchmarks allow you to monitor your progress and adapt if things aren’t going well. On the other hand, they can be shaped to fit new goals if you’re easily hitting them. Be flexible.

Proper planning and publishing

So, when planning your content, here are some things that you need to make sure you do:

Quality first – the age-old saying of ‘quality before quantity’ definitely applies to this. Sure, you want to post frequently, but if the content isn’t good, then your audience will get bored and will less likely become customers.

Understand your audience – before posting, you should have an idea of the type of content your audience wants. They’ll be more likely to connect to content they enjoy and this is done by understanding your audience demographic.

Remember your values – your brand values are what makes your company unique. Don’t stray away from this for easy views and engagement. Stick to what means the most to your company than going for cheap likes.

Consistency – this is crucial. It is one of the golden rules of publishing. A schedule will help you to stay on top of your content, as well as ensure you post at the optimal time. It keeps your audience coming back for more.

Using analytics

Successful marketing campaigns rely heavily on analytics for collecting data and monitoring performance. All the best companies track their channels to see how effective they are. Without using analytics, you can’t do the following:

Finding the optimal time to post content
Learning what your audience likes
Discover which channel works the best for your business
Fine-tune your strategy to become more efficient
See how well your competitors are performing in comparison to you

This gives you a platform to see what works and what doesn’t, allowing you to evolve and get better. Improvement and adaptation is key to getting the most from your platforms. This will also reduce wasting time and money, create better future campaigns, increasing your success rate.

Engagement

It is great planning and posting content, however, without engaging with your audience, you won’t see the best benefits. You won’t always receive the feedback you want, however, without negative feedback, you can’t make changes.

Learn to listen to engagement to transform your brand to suit your audience. This will only lead to your brand enhancing its overall customer experience and lead to more sales.

Remember, social listening isn’t just about customer experience. There are other benefits such as:

Learning industry inside knowledge
Understanding new trends
Explore different revenue streams
Finding influences in your area

How Can I Promote My Business On Social Media For Free?

Firstly, most social media apps are free. The biggest platforms are free to download, with most having in house features that you have to pay for, such as posting ads and paying for influencers to promote your brand.

However, you can use a strategy called organic social media marketing. This is a way of making use of the free social media tools available online to build and engage with followers.

There are great tools such as Canva to design and create content that is more attractive to customers. Engaging with customers is free too, as well as researching trends.

Sure, this may take more time, but if you put the effort in, you can see your follower count organically grow. Try using hashtags that are individual to your niche and follow people in your industry.

Take some time each day to research what trends and doing well and try to jump on them as early as you can. Now more than ever, you can use these apps to grow exponentially. Don’t be disheartened when you aren’t gaining millions of followers overnight, but trust the process and build a community.