A quick overview of Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is the process of creating content that you have tailored to the context of each individual social media platform in order to drive user engagement and sharing. Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with your audience to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. This involves publishing great content on your social media profiles, listening to and engaging your followers, analyzing your results, and running social media advertisements.

The major social media platforms (at the moment) are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat. Social media marketing first started with publishing. Businesses were sharing their content on social media to generate traffic to their websites and, hopefully, sales. But social media has matured far beyond being just a place to broadcast content.

Nowadays, businesses use social media in a myriad of different ways. For example, a business that is concerned about what people are saying about its brand would monitor social media conversations and response to relevant mentions (social media listening and engagement). A business that wants to understand how it’s performing on social media would analyze its reach, engagement, and sales on social media with an analytics tool (social media analytics). A business that wants to reach a specific set of audience at scale would run highly-targeted social media ads (social media advertising). As a whole, these are often also known as social media management.

The Five Core Pillars of Social Media Marketing:

1. Strategy
2. Planning and Publishing
3. Listening and Engagement
4. Analytics
5. Advertising

Social media platforms are always evolving. When Facebook first started, people can only share text updates. Now, there are so many content formats such as images, videos, live videos, and Stories. Hence, social media marketing is always changing, too. Social media itself is a catch-all term for apps and sites that may provide radically different social actions. For instance, Twitter is a social site designed to let people share short messages and media links with others. Facebook, meanwhile, is a full-blown social networking site that allows for sharing updates, photos, joining events, groups and a variety of other activities.