Social Media Marketing for Dummies

Traditional marketing and digital marketing are both areas of marketing that require vast insight and skillsets including a lot of study in order to excel in them. Now, however, there is Social Media Marketing (SSM), a facet of Digital marketing that is hugely powerful, vital to any business but that doesn’t have the time for years of studying.

And the best part?

It’s super easy, mostly free and even Digital Marketing ‘Dummies’ can do it with the right tools and know-how at their disposal. At Atomic, we help our clients with their social accounts all the time and so we wrote our own Social Media Marketing for Dummies blog in order to help those of you that want to learn yourselves.

WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING?

SSM is the use of social media platforms/websites to promote and market a business or product. It helps spread brand awareness, builds trust & transparency, and most importantly gives you a good idea about what’s trending out there.

It’s a technique that is getting increasingly popular and although digital marketing is extremely relevant, social media platforms are making it even more accessible to market your products on there.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT SMM

In order to understand just how amazing Social Media Marketing really is and what sort of impact it can have on your business, we’ve created this Social Media Marketing for Dummies Blog to give you hints and tips on how to get the most out of it.

1. YOUR FOLLOWING

We’re going to want to start with addressing your following, one of the most important elements of Social presence. As a brand you want to be seen, correct?

Of course.

Social media ensures that you are constantly in contact with your audience. To achieve optimal results with SMM, you want to be able to connect and know your audience inside and out. Make sure you are always active and staying relevant, but most importantly, be responsive and quick!

People will come to social media to address their problems/questions they have and praise for your brand so you need to be able to get to them pronto. You don’t need customers thinking you’re a company that doesn’t care about their audience or it’s customer service.

Lastly, to increase your following you also have the option of Paid SMM. This is where you can invest in your adverts to land on the timelines of your desired target audience. That means that you can reach the perfect clients, who fit your demographic or Digital Persona and don’t have to waste time/money marketing to people who won’t benefit from your services.

Have you ever wondered how Facebook makes all of its money? Predominantly through Ads. The popularity of such platforms means they know A LOT about their users, uploading information about every aspect of their lives. This fundamentally leads to the perfect marketing tool, with advertisers being able to target detailed Digital Personas through this information – no channel in history has ever offered such detailed targeting you can rely on.

What’s better is that customers can also be led straight to your page or website by just clicking on your advert that you strategically placed on their social media feed.

2. SOCIAL MEDIA IS WHERE YOU FIND PEOPLE

Above we discussed paid search, so you already know that you can find new clientele through social media. However, finding people on social media is much deeper than that and here’s why.

We now live in a world run by technology and most communication happens online using simple household items, over a phone or a laptop or some other wonderful gadget we got for Christmas!

With this in mind, you won’t be surprised to know that there are now 3.5 Billion Social Media Users in the world which equates to approximately 45% of the global population.

You can immediately see just how beneficial it’ll be for your business to have a proper social media marketing strategy in place.

You know that people are online, those people have the potential to be your customers so make sure they find you and are happy with what they see.

3. YOUTUBE DRIVES THE HIGHEST PERCENTAGE OF TRAFFIC OF ANY SOCIAL PLATFORM

When you’re thinking of what to advertise your business on, the first social media platforms you think of are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc. And that’s fair enough because people don’t always think of YouTube as a promotional place for businesses, maybe not as known as others.

But you might be missing a trick!

YouTube videos get so much attention and people usually go to YouTube to see the product they want to buy being used. These videos usually come up on a Google search when you put a product into the search engine.

So, make sure you take part in video content for your brand as a part of your social media marketing strategy!

4. IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT BRAND AWARENESS

Brand awareness is probably the first thing that comes to mind when you think about making your business a social media account on the various platforms. It acts as your online face that will be what welcomes your audience into seeing what you have to offer and keeps them up to date with what you are doing.

What people don’t know is that social media can actually help skyrocket your revenue!

You’ll be delighted to know that social commerce increases by around 45% every year for social media sales.

So get yourself involved!

5. HOW MUCH TIME PEOPLE SPEND ONLINE

With pretty much everyone having a mobile phone, it means everyone has access to a portable device that allows them to go onto social media wherever they are in the world.

In fact, there are 3.5 billion people in the world right now owning a mobile phone.

That’s 3.5 billion opportunities to reach out as a business.

But how long are people spending online and on social media?

On average, three hours is how long someone spends on social networking and messaging in a day, and that’s just an average, in fact right now the screen time on my phone is at an average of 4 hours and 32 minutes a day.

The younger generation is spending more time on their phones compared to people over 60, they are used to growing up in a technological run world where the older generation isn’t.

Based on this it’s safe to say that SMM is rising each year and it’s a positive trend for a business to benefit from, you want people online on social media actively looking through their timeline so that they stumble across YOU!

HOW TO GET STARTED ON SOCIAL MEDIA

There’s so much you can do to get involved with SMM. Start off by making business accounts on all of the social media platforms you desire, the best ones being Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.

Make content you would be impressed with; you should be your harshest critic so be picky and aim to do nothing but please.

Don’t play it safe, put yourself out there and make video content for YouTube showcasing your products and services and having people review it, test it and show people how it looks/works. That’s where you’re going to find people looking for information on items they’re interested in and interested in buying.

How often should you post to social media? The short answer is as often as you can with good quality content – don’t post simply for the sake of posting! But let me break it down for you a little bit more.

Especially if you’re not a business with hundreds of thousands of followers you want to be posting frequently, here’s a list of specifics for three social media platforms.

Facebook

At a minimum, you should be posting to your Facebook page three times a week.

Most studies agree that once a day is optimal, with an absolute MAXIMUM of two posts per day.

However, HubSpot found that pages with under 10,000 followers experienced a 50% drop in engagement per post if they posted more than once a day.

Twitter is completely different than Facebook because there are so many more active users and Tweets are seen as much less formal, so this is more of a bit of fun and staying relevant.

The top accounts are posting about 100 times a day, and I know that seems excessive so studies found that if a small business posts anywhere from 1-51 times a day they should see some engagement. All you have got to remember is the more the better with this platform!

Instagram

We all love Instagram, we know it as the trendy one in social media because it’s visual and quick!.

The advice Instagram itself gives businesses is to aim to post three times a week, like Facebook, it also states that for optimal success post 1-2 times a day but not close together, so you could do one in the morning and another one the same night.

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED IN OUR SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING FOR DUMMIES GUIDE?

Social media marketing is such a good way to keep your business relevant and know the trends going on in the big wide world of social media, we have also covered five benefits SMM is going to have on your business. Go and put it to the test or Click Here to get in touch and see how we can help you succeed on Social Media!

Social Media Marketing for Dummies, Written by Amelia Dean