In a broader sense, social media marketing or SMM is a form of online marketing that aims to promote branding and achieve marketing communication objectives through the use of various social networking websites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, and LinkedIn among many others. Social media often refers to the space that covers all activities within the social networking sites, including user interaction, content promotion, video and images publishing, and even audio exposure.
Where to start your social media campaigns?
Before signing up for an account on Facebook or building your fan base on Twitter, you have to start by defining you business goals, identifying your specific objectives, and determining the overall process for campaign execution first. Like any other marketing strategies, begin with the end in mind.
Cliché as it sounds, but the adage “fail to plan, plan to fail” still holds true specially to business matters and objectives. While you need to create a roadmap for your online marketing ventures, you must decide first on what goals and resulting metrics would you want to achieve.
To begin, ask yourself: What do I want to achieve? What do I expect from this marketing strategy? How am I going to attain it?
Through social media marketing, the following online marketing objectives can be met:
- Website traffic and user behaviour, which can be done through external and internal tracking;
- Conversion and sales tracking;
- Visits, page views, and ad exposure
- Brand introduction and awareness
- Positive brand association and reputation management
- Business development
- Broader customer reach
Incorporating the numbers on social media
After identifying your online marketing goals and objectives, the question now is how will you create these activities and convert the numbers on your chosen social networking sites?
Since the social web allows interaction and communication among web users, create and promote content that can get links and viral attraction, you can – with the right strategy – reach key influencers using this medium.
Social media expansion is important because this provides foundations for broader and faster mindshare, along with supporting your search engine marketing objectives. Not only does it provide quantitative data, but qualitative information and opinions from potential customers, more importantly. Through social media marketing, you can convert traffic if you target appropriately.