What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with your audience to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. This involves publishing great content on your social media profiles, listening to and engaging your followers, analyzing your results, and running social media advertisements.
The major social media platforms (at the moment) are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat.
There are also a range of social media management tools that help businesses to get the most out of the social media platforms listed above. For example, Buffer is a platform of social media management tools, which can help you achieve success with your social media marketing. Whether you want to build a brand or grow your business, we want to help you succeed.
How are search and social media marketing related?
Why would a search marketer — or a site about search engines — care about social media? The two are very closely related.
Social media often feeds into the discovery of new content such as news stories, and “discovery” is a search activity. Social media can also help build links that in turn support into SEO efforts. Many people also perform searches on social media sites to find people and content.
Social networking sites:
Most of us are familiar with social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. These platforms help us connect with friends, family, and brands. They encourage knowledge-sharing and are all about personal, human-to-human interaction.
A social networking site is a Jill of all trades. Users can share thoughts, curate content, upload photos and videos, form groups based on interests, and participate in lively discussions. They’re built around the user and everything that’s important to them and their social circles.
Social review sites:
Review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor display reviews from community members for all sorts of locations and experiences. This eliminates a lot of the guesswork that goes into booking a restaurant or hotel. Not sure it’s the right thing for you? Check out the reviews and you’ll know.
Image sharing sites:
Visual content like images, infographics, and illustrations capture our hearts, eyes and imaginations. Social media platforms like Instagram, Imgur, and Snapchat are designed to amplify the power of image sharing.
Video hosting sites:
YouTube revolutionized the way we watch, create, and think about video. It transformed the medium into something accessible. Recent improvements in tech and connectivity helped video go the rest of the way.
Community blogs:
Sometimes an image or post isn’t complex enough for the message you’ve got to share, but not everyone on the internet wants to run a blog from a self-hosted website. That’s a lot of work.
Discussion sites:
While most of us have seen many a heated discussion happen on Facebook, discussion sites like Reddit and Quora are specifically designed to spark a conversation. Anyone is free to ask a question or make a statement, and this attracts people with shared interests and curiosities. However, unlike Facebook and Instagram, users tend to give out less identifiable information.
Advantages of Social Media Marketing:
