What is SMM?
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing (SMM) is when you use your social platforms for brand promotion, audience interaction, increasing website traffic, and boosting sales. Organic social content is at the core of SMM.
Organic social content just means that is it free content, not paid social media. Although for businesses, it can be good to incorporate a little bit of both in your overall strategy.
Social Media in 2021
YouTube
Facebook
Twitter
TikTok
Pinterest
Snapchat
LinkedIn
Instagram
Post organically to your account, but who will see it?
A percentage of your followers
Your follower's friends, if they share a post
People following the hashtags you use
People finding you through keywords in the algorithm
Benefits of Social Media Marketing
Increase brand loyalty
Increase traffic to your website
Fast content distribution
Interaction with your target audience
Industry and competitor insights
What you need is a simple and concise strategy.
The main purpose of SMM should be to engage with your users and increase followers. For a small business, the best way to have an effective SMM strategy is to focus your energy on one social media platform at a time. Grow your following in that specific place first before taking on too many more.
The key for anyone wanting to grow their reach is to plan your content and be consistent. A content plan of at least one month in advance is usually the best. Planning out frequent content posts will give you the upper hand, and the algorithm of the social media platforms will love you for it.
Funnily enough, the research shows that if you post manually and do not use a robot program to do your posts for you, your posts will get a lot more engagement. It seems that social media platforms know when a scheduling program has been used, businesses who post themselves are, in turn, rewarded with more user interaction. Mind-blowing, right?!
Another important thing to think about is that each social media channel should have content specifically designed for that platform. For example, if you post a video to Youtube, that video needs to be cut down and made into just a few seconds long for Instagram reels or Facebook Stories. The same piece of content won't necessarily work for all social channels; you will need to follow what trends are out there on the different platforms to create engagement and make the algorithm happy.
A tip for creating content that will do well across the different channels is to look for your ''gold''. What content have you posted before that performed really well and that your followers loved? Was it something that had a strong headline? Was it an Instagram post that had lots of likes and comments?
Find those pieces of gold within your own existing content and create similar things, such as a strong performing Instagram reel that can be turned into a Youtube video. Use that winning headline for a blog article to post on Pinterest and then link to your website. There are many ways to go about it, but chances are you already have gold at your fingertips.
Another tip is to use the information available. Look at your data, your likes, your comments, and if you want an even wider range of data, look to other people in your industry, look to similar brands or even look to your competitors. You can see what things are popular within your industry and model your content strategy from that. This doesn't mean you can outright copy people but use them as inspiration. What sort of content performs? Is it blogs? Is it photos? Quotes? Reels? What is it that people in your industry want to see? What encourages engagement from your target audience? And go from there using your own words and ideas.
SMM can be fun! Engaging with your customers and target audience has never been easier. You can pop up a questionnaire in Instagram stories and literally ask your followers what their pains are and what they need from you. 2021 is an exciting time in the world of digital marketing, and with organic social content being a cost-free and exciting way to grow your business, there has never been a better time to start posting content!
Want to learn more about SMM for your business?
Contact us now for a chat on how we can get you started.
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