What is Social Media Marketing?

As the name suggests, Social Media Marketing is a kind of marketing where various social media sites are used to gain website traffic. The aim of Social Media Marketing is to share interesting and engaging content that draws the attention of the readers. The content could be in the form of text, graphics, videos, news feeds, instant messages, etc. The social media sites are a great platform to promote and advertise one’s products, services, events and brand. Companies use various social media sites to execute their marketing strategies, contact customers, learn their requirements, interact with them directly and promote their brand. Every social media site has its own benefits and unique features.

Let’s look into some of the popular Social Media sites:

• Facebook, with its really broad network, allows individuals and businesses to share posts, images, videos, join communities and events. Some of the striking features of Facebook are easy sharing of content, graphics, videos, news feed, groups, search, events, email notification, posting as a page, featured admins, custom audiences, etc.

• Twitter is another popular social media site that allows people to share short messages or send and receive updates (tweets) from others. It facilitates constant flow of news flashes or important links of content, photos, PDF files, or even videos. It is a great social media site for businesses to increase traffic to their website and blog.

• LinkedIn is one of the most popular social media platforms for professionals. Professionals from all over the world can connect to like-minded people, share their professional experiences, get information, post job openings, etc. It is believed that every second, a new member signs up on Linkedin. Features like Recommendations, Resume, Events, Groups, easy linking to Dropbox, Wordpress & Slide Share makes it very useful.

• Google+ is a social media platform that is highly ranked on Google search results. Google+ provides amazing social media experiences to businesses. Features like real-time updates, circles, Hangouts, The sand bar, Tagging, sharing makes Google+ a favorite for new as well as well-established organizations. Companies can build a direct connection between their Goggle+ page and website to drive traffic and leverage their brand image.

• YouTube is a very unique social media site with distinctive features. It is basically a video sharing platform where users can view, upload and even share videos with others. YouTube is a very powerful site to showcase a company’s products, services and brand through videos. Businesses can make use of features like Subscription Feed, YouTube Analytics, Audience retention, Annotations and Playback Locations helps to know more about your customers and deliver better products and services.

• Instagram is an image sharing social media platform, where the businesses can share several images and even short video streams with their existing and potential customers. Then, these images and videos can be shared on other social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Companies can even record videos or take photographs on Instagram and just upload and share them with their clients and others. Instagram has amazing filters that can be applied on images.

• Social Bookmarking Websites: There are various social bookmarking sites like Pinterest, (which facilities its users to “pin” images and videos online which the users can save or even share with others), StumbleUpon (which finds, recommends and rates web pages, images, videos to its users based on their interests), Delicious (used for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks with features like RSS Feeds, API), Digg (one of the best story tellers on the internet! Digg selects the best news stories on the internet related to various topics for its readers).

Advantages of Social Media Marketing:

1. Cost Effective: Undoubtedly, Social Media Marketing is cheaper than traditional forms of marketing. Uploading an image on Facebook or Twitting to your customers or posting a job opening on LinkedIn is much cheaper than marketing through radio, television or newspaper. 2. Reaching Wider Audience: Today, social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are used by every other individual and Professional. By using these platforms, you can easily market your products and services to a very broad spectrum of society. 3. Rich Content: Through social media you can upload, share and read rich content in terms of text, beautiful and relevant images, impactful audios, stunning videos, instant news feeds and so on. Use of multimedia on these social media sites, helps you to convey your message in variety of ways. 4. Easily accessible and convenient: If you know how to surf internet, then social media platforms are not rocket science for you. Yes, you can easily grasp the ways to use these sites anywhere and anytime. Social Media Marketing requires - a PC, internet connection and your creativity, whichever part of the world you are residing. 5. Strong and Trustworthy Relationships: If you use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, etc regularly to interact with your customers, understand their needs, constantly upload useful information and come up with innovative ideas, you can easily create a strong bond with your customers. 6. Advanced featured: Social media sites are constantly adding new and useful features to their kitty. For instance, features like Reporting, Analysis, Recommendations, Groups, Events, RSS Feeds, Email Notifications, image filters, tagging, news flashes, etc help businesses to connect to a large audience and promote their brand image.

Tools:

There are various tools that help Professionals in Social Media Marketing. Some of them are Mention, Buffer, Feedly, Twitter Counter,Track Twitter progress, Zapier, Quintly, Addvocate, Swayy, Compfight, Tagboard, ManageFlitter and Socialbakers.