Impact of Social Media Presence

“Social media will help you build up loyalty of your current customers to the point that they will willingly, and for free, tell others about you”

Social media has transformed the way we function, in our daily lives. It's unavoidable, it's powerful and it's here to stay. Here are a few statistics to put things into perspective:

Source: Oberlo Report, 2020 on “Social Media Statistics in 2021”

Social media marketing allows business owners to communicate with their customers beyond local and social boundaries, and also offer countless possibilities of sharing content in the form of photos, videos and experiences.

What is Social media marketing?

• It is the use of social media platforms to connect with the target audience to build the company’s brand, improve sales and drive website traffic.
• It involves publishing impressive content on your social media profiles, listening to and engaging with your followers, analysing your results, and running social media advertising campaigns.
• While there are plenty of niche and special interest social media channels, each has built its own outreach and presence amongst the target audience thru - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, Youtube, WeChat, etc.

What are the benefits of a strong social media presence?

• Allows the entity to improve their visibility in front of their target audience, virtually
• Transforms business communications- all stakeholders get to deliver an opinion
• Allows businesses to become omnipresent
• Increases referrals
• Search engine optimization (SEO) techniques allows businesses to strategically place their products / services on the audience’s feed
• Helps the entity to gauge and measure audience feedback
• Generate customer loyalty- build brand communities

How to structure an impactful Social Media Marketing Campaign?

1. Strategy: The social media strategy must be built around the following questions:
2. What are your social media goals? These could include increasing brand awareness, drive website traffic, generate engagement to build brand communities
3. Which social media platforms would help you to achieve those? Although there are various platforms available, it's advisable when starting out, to focus on a few platforms where you are sure of your target audience’s presence.
4. What type of content would engage your target audience? This process requires clarity on the interest and engagement level of your target audience. The content could be entertaining, educational, humorous, etc, depending on what your content theme would be. The general mantra in content creation is don’t interrupt what interests people—be what interests people. It could be through photos, videos, blogs, memes, tutorials, .. to name a few!
5. Planning & Publishing: to maximise your visibility and reach on social media,
• Develop a structured timeline to publish content
• Put great content out, but with the right timing and frequency.
• Understand when your target audience is most active on social media
• Based on understanding which previous posts garnered most engagement, re-structure your content
• Analyse the reach (no. of views, no. of downloads, no. of shares or likes) of each post
6. Listening and Engagement: Once your social media following starts to grow, People are commenting, liking, sharing your content, followers are tagging you in their posts and the “right buzz around your brand” is being created.
• Should start to monitor conversations around your brand
• Positive feedback, can be used as user testimonial
• Negative feedback, should be reverted to (if critical) and incorporated into product change
• Use Social media listening and engagement tools (here!) which helps in aggregating all social media mentions, messages and tags
7. Analytics and Reporting: this step is essential to understand how your content is performing on various platforms. These could include:
• Demographics of your followers
• Total number of positive mentions in a month
• Are you reaching more potential customers than last month
• How many users are using the brands hashtag
• How many users have likes, shared or subscribed to your brand’s content
• Which social media platform is working out best for your brand
• Increase in the number of followers, each month….. And much more than this!
• Many social media platforms do provide a basic level of information, but it's advisable to use a wide range of social media analytics tools available across the web.
8. Advertising: Once the brand community is building, and the content is connecting with the audience, it's time to boost it with social media ads.

• When you are ready to invest in social media then use social ads to spread awareness about your brand.
• It will help you in reaching the maximum number of users and displaying ads to your targeted audience.
• Create ads based the target audience’s demographics, interests and behaviors

Conclusion: 

With an overwhelming amount of competitors in the market, it's important for growing companies to utilise every mode of communication, tool and platform to make an impact on their customers. Social media presence provides just that and more!

In the words of Don Schultz, a marketing pioneer,

"Social media creates communities, not just markets”