The variety of social media platforms available today combined with the billions of social media users online at any given time means that social media is becoming a vital tool if you want to grow a business. Social media allows for instant connection with your followers and gives them the ability to share your product with others by just clicking a button.
The built-in analytics that exist in social media channels is crucial to helping brands learn more about their customers and their competitors. Businesses are using social media marketing to grow their online presences, boost their brand awareness, and increase sales more than ever before.
Types of Social Media Marketing
There are two primary types of social media marketing– paid and unpaid. Paid marketing requires a financial investment to push your content out to potential customers, while unpaid marketing involves developing content that your audience will want to engage with and share with others. Both are important to take advantage of when you want to grow your business and widen your customer base.
There are several advantages to paying for marketing to make note of. First, the impact is more immediate; once you’ve made your initial investment, content is immediately available for viewers to interact with. It can also be budget-friendly, since you can decide how large or small your campaign will be. A smaller investment will obviously mean reaching fewer people, but the hope is that eventually your marketing tactics will pay off and allow you to approve a larger marketing budget in the future. Finally, you control your own paid media. Unpaid marketing can sometimes have unintended consequences if your business or product receives negative reviews.
Unpaid social media marketing is also sometimes referred to as organic marketing, and it encompasses two main components– the content you create on platforms such as Facebook or Instagram that do not charge a fee for their use, and “earned marketing” through shares, likes, and other engagement on your posts. The primary advantage of organic marketing is that it is generally viewed as more trustworthy; customers tend to rely on word of mouth more than anything else when deciding whether to make a purchase. Organic marketing is usually freely and deliberately shared from satisfied customers, so potential customers consider it more authentic and will therefore give it more attention than a paid advertisement for the same product.
Important Social Media Marketing Techniques
Maintaining active social media accounts and posting content routinely is vital for most businesses these days; customers often view regular posts as a sign of trustworthiness. But being active online can seem like a time-consuming task, especially for small business owners and influencers who manage their posts independently. Luckily, there are several scheduling tools available to help you schedule your posts ahead of time. These tools often include analytics to help you understand when to post to gain the most interaction and shares from your followers and attract new ones.
It also goes without saying that online brand management involves a good amount of interacting with your customers, but as your business grows it can be harder to manage the influx of comments, DMs, and shares. Social media monitoring tools (also sometimes called social listening tools) can help mitigate these problems to simplify the often daunting task of managing your brand’s online presence. Many of these tools have the capability to instantly notify you when your brand receives a negative response online so you can quickly respond before larger issues emerge. You can also use these programs to track negative mentions of your competitors, enabling you to quickly offer a preferable alternative.
To make the most of your social media pages, analytics tools are useful when you want to learn more about how users are interacting with your content. Major platforms offer basic analytical information but these programs take it to a whole new level, especially since many of them have the capability to monitor pages on multiple platforms from one location. Analytics tools provide information about when your posts garner the most interaction so you know when to schedule your posts in the future. They also have features that enable you to better understand which platforms and influencers would be the best choice to market your product to the widest audience. All of this data can then be used to generate reports that will help make crucial business decisions such as where to invest your budget or how to change a particular marketing strategy.
Learn about Social Media Marketing with Career Centers
If you’re hoping to improve your business by learning more about social media marketing, check out the social media marketing courses available with Noble Desktop, a partner program of Career Centers. Here, students are given the flexibility to take classes online or remotely from anywhere in the world. Noble Desktop offers a Digital Marketing Certificate. This is a 78-hour course that covers marketing strategies on major social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. The course also includes units related to Google Analytics and SEO. Noble Desktop boasts small class sizes and expert instructors. They also allow students to retake their classes for free within one year of the original course date.