When starting a business, it can be overwhelming to understand what it means to have an online presence and what you need to do to ensure that your digital content reflects what your company represents. Equally, knowing how to improve your social media platforms can be tricky if you have a long-standing business.

So, as social media experts, we’re here to answer your burning social media questions and provide you with the information you need to improve your social presence and help your business thrive. So, without further ado, let’s get answering your social media questions.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, to reach, engage, and make an impression on your online target audience. There are several ways to use social media as part of your digital marketing strategy, which we will explore later. However, there are three main reasons a business should and will use social media marketing.

• To increase brand awareness
• To drive traffic to their website
• To sell their products or services

In addition, social media marketing also covers the interactions businesses have with their customers or clients over social media platforms. This covers all forms of communication, including engagements such as likes, comments, and direct messaging. These interactions allow businesses to continue working on the above points to enable their business to progress.

Who Uses Social Media?

More than half of the world’s population (59%) use social media in one way or another. This statistic means it’s rather likely that members of your target audience are readily available on these platforms.

In addition, more businesses than ever before are also utilising social media, so you must use your platforms to their potential to establish yourself as an industry leader. By not doing, you are missing out on many potential opportunities. You could allow yourself to be forgotten about and replaced with others in your sector who are active on social media.

What Is a Social Media Campaign?

A social media campaign is much more than the general social media content you will upload daily. These campaigns are more thorough, thought out, specific, and targeted at your audience. They take careful consideration, research, and planning to perfection and often take some trial and error. In addition, social media is constantly changing, and trending topics come and go, features are updated, and algorithms are altered. Because of this, you must be prepared to focus on your social media campaign and be willing to update them as you go.

A great social media marketing campaign focuses on business goals and potential outcomes. To do this, think about what your goals are. For example, if one goal is to increase brand awareness, your social media campaign should reflect this and provide researched tasks to get where you need to be.

How Can Social Media Help Your Business?

Social media platforms do exactly what they say on the tin; they allow people to be social by connecting and chatting online. So how does this help your business? In addition to the personal use of social media platforms, more and more people are now using the likes of Facebook and Twitter, for example, to research products and services from businesses they intend to purchase from. This means that having a strong social media presence makes your business far more likely to be trusted by potential customers.

Your social media campaign research will allow you to target those in your intended audience and bring in the traffic through targeted posts, the use of hashtags, and other beneficial social media tools available on each platform.

How Do You Begin Social Media Marketing?

We understand that this can all be a little confusing for those with little to no experience using social media for businesses, which is why we’re here to help. Before you can create a social media strategy, you must be able to define your target audience and the platforms they are most likely to utilise. This initial research is vital and will ensure you attract the right people when posting.

As part of this research, you should conduct competitor analysis and look at how other businesses in your industry use their platforms. While it may seem like a great idea to put time and money into platforms that other companies in the sector aren’t using, this may indicate that your target audience doesn’t use said platform enough for it to be worth spending time on. So instead, you can use this information to understand which platforms are worth using and which aren’t.

After this, set your goals. Whether this is increasing followers, improving traffic to the website, or something else, having a clear vision of what you expect out of your social media campaign will allow you to track progress and how you can improve.

How Can I Monitor Engagement? 

Monitoring engagement is crucial as it allows you to understand what is going well and what you need to improve on in terms of your social media campaign. You must be able to track engagement such as impressions, likes, comments, shares, favourites, and anything else your business would benefit from knowing. You can monitor your engagement in several ways, one of which is through a third-party social media management tool. Each online tool offers a different package, so conducting research before committing to a contract is essential.

Once you have this information, you can use it to find out what you need to change in line with your social media campaign. As previously mentioned, the world of social media is constantly evolving, so being aware of these changes and how your business fits in is crucial to the success of your campaign.For more information on improving your online presence, please don’t hesitate to contact us, and a member of our team will be more than happy to help.