What is Social Media Marketing and How to Use It?

Social networking sites has taken a major place in digital world and using social media to promote your business can be beneficial in many ways. People spend most of their online time on various social sites. You can use these platforms to create your brand awareness and do promotional activities to sell your products and services.

Some of the major platforms in this area are facebook, twitter, linkedin, pinterest, google +, instagram etc. Each site has different type of users with different types of interests as on facebook people like to engage with funny, entertaining and light-hearted posts, whereas professionals use linkedin to create business relations and networks.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing (SMM) is a term that refers to the process of gaining traffic or attention through social media sites as stated on Search Engine Land. Social sites has huge user base you can get an idea about it that only facebook has 1.7 billion users and by doing marketing of your product and services on these platforms you are opening a floodgate of potential customers.

You can use this to do quite a few things to improve your business.

• Create brand value
• Get traffic to website
• Build connection with customers
• Promote products and services

Know the Difference between Various Social Media Platforms

But before using social media platforms to market your business, you need to know which platform belongs to which kind of people. As I have mentioned before in this article, people will like posts with pictures on facebook more than just a text. On twitter you can share your post as a tweet which is 140 characters long text and professionals and businesses use it more. So you can share more serious professional oriented posts on twitter, linkedin and google+. pinterest and instagram supports only photos to share where by using YouTube you can share videos with your followers.

It is necessary to test which platform is suitable for your business and where your potential clients is spending their time. So before starting know your audience properly, which age group or gender they belong and what their interests are.

Engage More People

After finding the right platform with right audience you can start making connections with people with the posts that make them interested in your business. But irrespective of huge user base of these platforms you need to often or more often do sponsored posts or premium ads to reach more people and grab attention. As there are more users so there is huge competition among businesses. It is similar as google provides adwords services along with its organic search service.

Start building social presence of your business before launching your business or business website. But you may ask that before launching website what you will share on social sites. You can share useful contents within your business area by others. By doing this you can get loyal audience for your business profile. But if you only post your contents and promotional stuffs, then it is likely that people may think that you only doing this only to make profits out of it and doesn’t bother about real problems of them.