What is Social Media Marketing ? | Step-By-Step Guide to Increase your Social Influence.

What is Social Media Marketing ?

Social Media Marketing  is the effective use of various social media platforms to engage with your audience and develop your brand with a motive to grow your business.

                 As Internet has developed to such a large scale and has become a necessity rather than an luxury, it changed the way to market the products and services on a global scale. This revolution caused many social media platforms to rise and come into the picture. Many popular Social media platforms as we know today mainly including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat etc. are not only used by individuals for personal branding but even by companies to connect to their audience.

                Social Media plays a very vital role in Digital Marketing. From a company's point of view, it can be used as a platform to showcase your product and services and target particular segment of people interested in your service making it easy to get conversions and turn them into your customers. It can also be used to respond to any queries your customers have regarding your service. We can even get feedback from the customers then analyse the data to see how a particular service or product is performing in the market and are there are improvements needed. This also encourages healthy relations with your customers making them loyal towards your brand.

● Five Steps towards successful Social Media Marketing

• Strategy -

Making the right strategy is the first and foremost thing to do. Here are some questions that should come to your mind while planning the right strategy.

1) What is the ultimate goal ?

You'll have to decide your goal beforehand. Is it to promote your product, or to drive traffic to your website, or to gather feedback from your customers and respond to their queries.  Each of this can be achieved through all the major social media platforms.

2) What type of Content are you going to share ?

Content is basically of four types, audio, video, text and image. Try sharing some infographics and statistics which add more value to your content. Decide weather you are going to share one of them or a mixture of content for your audience. Choose wisely for which type of content will best suite your goals.

3) Which Social Media Platform suits you the most ?

After deciding your goal and the type of content you are willing to offer, you'll have to choose a platform that can help you the most in terms of achieving your goals. For this purpose you'll have to use the trial and error method to find out which platform you're comfortable with and can deliver your content more efficiently.

• Publishing Your Content -

Publishing the right content at the right time gives a added value to it. So plan your content accordingly and maintain consistency.

              Publishing a post is as simple as sharing any photo or video. The only key here is the consistency.  Don't just bombard your feed with too much of content, keep it slow and simple. Maintain a proper schedule as to when to post (like every alternate day or 4 posts per week) and stick to it. See which country most of your audience are and what time would they most likely be active on social media and then post accordingly. If your audience are globally spread across various countries, then there are tools that can help you manage feeds and notify them according to their time-zones. We'll offer you the links to some of the tools at the end of this post.

• Engagement With Audience -

As your social media influence increases you'll notice more and more people connect to your brand. People will also give comments, like, share, etc. Keep one thing clear in your mind that the comments won't always be on the positive side. There will be people talking negatively or criticizing your product/service. Don't take this negatively and get demotivated, instead consider it as a feedback and try to resolve their queries.


Try to engage with your audience as much as possible, this is a key to success. Don't just read through their comments, respond to them where it's necessary. Well it becomes difficult at times when you have a  large number of audience, but then again we have tools that can help you with the same. These tools show you the comments where people are taking about your brand weather or weather not they've tagged you in it.

• Analysis -

This is a important step as analysing the content is a major way to improve your reach. Now a days many social media platforms Iike instagram have a feature to create a personal, creator and company account where they've offered tools and features accordingly. These tools allow you to have a look at your insights which include how many people you were able to reach with your posts, how many of them liked or shared them, which hashtag performed better and so on. There are some tools that can even suggest you which hashtag to use depending on your post. So keep analysing data and improve your reach.

• Advertising -

Now lets come to the last step which is advertising. Advertising plays a very important step in the process of building your audience. Social Media advertising is pretty easy and offers many benefits. Social Media platforms allow you to target a particular segment of people on the basis of factors like interests, area, behaviour, etc which makes sure that the right people are seeing your advertisements which obviously increases the CTR (Click Through Rate). You can even specify what is your targeted outcome from a specific ad unit, like website visit, increase likes, make them follow you etc. These Ad campaigns are PPC (Pay Per Click) based which means you only pay when someone clicks your Ad.

● Following are some Social Media Management Tools :

• Buffer
• Hootsuite
• Sprout Social
• Iconosquare
• Sendible