Social Media Marketing Guide | Definition & Choosing The Right Platform

The climate of social media marketing in Nigeria has changed since it was ever created.

Social media isn’t just another tool to communicate and talk with your friends, but it has grown to become this amazing opportunity to create an experience for your target audience, engage with them and boost your bottom line.

If you want to learn more about social media marketing and how you can use it to grow your business, then register for our professional digital marketing course today.

Or click the link to get started => https://digitalmarketingskill.com/digital-marketing-training-course/

We have a bunch of professional digital marketing trainers who are willing to pour down their knowledge to ensure that you achieve your goal of being a social media expert.

With the growth of social media, it has also come with some complications, a lot of business owners are confused on which platforms they need to concentrate their campaign efforts on.

Do you pay attention to Pinterest or Instagram? Twitter or WhatsApp, Google+ or Facebook, how about LinkedIn?

It’s hard making the right choice on which platform will drive the most ROI on time and money invested into it.

With all of the great options available for a business, you have to choose wisely.

That’s why we’ve created this straight-forward guide to direct you to what you need to do to choose the best social media platform, no matter what business you’re into.

Do You Need To Choose Just One?

People use various social media channels for various reasons.

For example, I use Facebook to connect with my family and friends and possibly share memories of pictures, videos and just essentially keep up with the interesting things that are going on in the lives of my friends.

On the hand, I use LinkedIn to connect with CEO’s, Editors and other people that will find my business proposition valuable.

Whichever platform you choose to use, it’s important to understand where your target audience is doing and the platforms they frequently use.

The amazing thing about having a multi-platform strategy is you get to reach as many clients as possible that are engaging on all these other social media channels.

If you have the strength and capacity to maintain a multi-platform strategy then there’s nothing wrong with that.

But any business lacking the resources to maintain several social media platforms will find it very difficult to succeed in their social media campaigns.

So if you are a small company, it might be best to take it easy, start and perfect one social media platform before jumping to others, most people underestimate what it takes to make one successful.

The truth is, at the end of the day, what’s most important is, whichever platform you choose to roll with, you must always, put out relevant and quality content on a consistent basis. Always engaging, always active and always producing content.

So in this guide, I will break down the various platforms that makes up all the popular social media websites in the world at the moment. And some useful links to further understand how you can leverage those platforms to grow your business.

Before we proceed, let start by understanding what social media marketing is?

What is Social Media Marketing?

Here are social media marketing definitions by top online marketing experts:

Tunji Ameen (Communication Manager): Defines social media marketing as the ability to effectively use social media to convert engagement online to actual customers.

Henrietta Anuforo (Course & corporate partnership manager): Social media can be described as the utilisation of social media as a tool to create awareness of a particular brand, topic or phenomenon.

Demola Ojulari (Creative Manager): Social media marketing is a concept that came out of the new digital age, it tends to destroy traditional marketing. You see, social media marketing was born out the mere fact that audiences, potential customers, customers and people generally spend most of their time on the mobile phone — doing what? Looking at other people’s picture on social media. At this junction, brands realise that the only way to reach their target audience, the only platform that can give them their target audience or their publics, in general, is to go to those social media platforms and engage with those people that are looking at other people’s picture and advertise to them.

Looking at the definitions above, we can come to the conclusion that social media has 3 critical elements which are content, engagement, traffic.

So if you ask me, my own definition of social media marketing is this…

Social media marketing is the process of channelling the right content tailored to a specific type of people across different social media platforms with the goal of increasing engagement, traffic and conversion.

We all want to drive traffic and conversions to our website from social media but how do you think it’s possible?

It is by feeding users with the right content to drive possible user engagement in the form of comments, social shares and likes.

Your content has to be good to make Demola want to share with his friends on Facebook, Twitter etc.

Okay, since we now know what social media marketing is, let’s look at some key social media terms.

Key Social Media Terms

Content: Content is whatever you are posting. It can be a Facebook status update, a photo on Instagram, a tweet, to pin something on a board on Pinterest, etc.

The graphic already showed you that content comes in many different forms and it needs to be custom-tailored to each platform. What’s even more important than content though, is context.

Context: Gary Vaynerchuk said that if content is king, context is god. You can have a great joke, but if you place it somewhere inside a 3,000-word blog post, it’ll probably go mostly unseen.

On Twitter, however, that same joke, as a tweet, might crush it (See this FCMB tweet below). Whoever is behind their social media handle really crushed it with that Jide Kosoko meme.

Knock knock knock
Good morning
Who is it?
It’s FC…
EFCC?
No, FCMB

And, the opposite is also true.

Packaging your entire blog post into one tweet is hardly possible, so try a good call-to-action with some relevant hashtags instead. Speaking of which…

Hashtags: By now, they’re a very common form used to add meta information on almost all social media channels. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest all use hashtags to let you describe the topic of your content or mark them as part of current trends.

They make your content easily discoverable and, thus, more likely to be shared.

Share: The currency of the social media world. Shares are all that matters on social media. People will keep talking to you about impressions, click-through rates and potential reach. But, none of these tells you whether people actually pass on what you have to say.

When people engage and interact with your content, that’s good. But, when they share it, that is the time when you celebrate.

A great tool to measure shares and the overall impact of content is Buzzsumo:

The more shares, the more people love your content. It’s the best form of engagement that people can make with it.

Engagement: A general term meaning people interact with the content that you produce. It can be a like, a recommend, a comment or a share. All of these are good, but the shares are where it’s at.’

It time we look at each social media marketing platforms in more details as I will be sharing history, statistics and info about them.

So let’s get started right away.

List Of Popular Social Media Marketing Platforms | A Brief History & Statistics

1. Facebook

Well, according to statistics Facebook has over 1.15 billion users, the closest social media platform in terms of users is Google+ with over 350 million users.

There is almost no comparison when it comes to the power of reach that Facebook has over these other social media platforms.

Another thing, the data that you have access to is exceptional from age, location, interests, behaviours, demographics, and so much more, you can use all of this insights to find a more targeted reach of users.

The disadvantage of this really lies in the fact that Facebook organic reach has been decreasing gradually, now it’s down to ten percent.

It’s very hard for a brand to gain visibility except they push their purses.

It’s a “pay for audience” game and for new brands just stepping into the market, it’s a bit hard for this brands to push an advertising budget.

And the big brands have the big bucks, so getting visible is quite a challenge due to a high stake of competition, except you are a very low competition.

2. Twitter

Twitter is an online social networking service founded in March 2006 that enables users to send short 280-character messages called tweets. As of the first quarter of 2017, Twitter had 328 million monthly active users and a whopping 500 million tweets per day.

Twitter’s value lies in its ability for your posts to go viral: the more people share your posts and “retweet” your content, the more followers you will attain.

You post recent news, updates and articles we have in major media.

Hashtags make a big difference in building momentum for your posts on this platform, so pay attention to what is trending today and include relevant hashtags.

You can also retweet people who have many followers to increase the likelihood of them following us back.

LinkedIn is arguably the world’s largest professional network.

It was founded May 5, 2003, and has managed to have more than 530 million users in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide.

If you are working in a B2B field, this is the social media network for you to focus on.

Connecting with business professionals in any industry is easiest with LinkedIn as it allows you to target them by industry, job title, etc.

As with all social media, LinkedIn prioritizes relationship building more than any other.

Don’t lead with a sales pitch; start by building a connection.

One of the best features for businesses are LinkedIn Groups. Businesses should establish Groups in your target niche or industry and invite others in your target market to join.

At my company, we focus on building new relationships with key prospects whose professional titles we’ve identified.

For example, we’ll search “CEO Speaker” to find people who are the heads of their companies and who also are active speakers.

Instagram is a photo and video sharing application founded October 2010. Instagram has over 500 million active monthly users.

Its users have shared over 40 billion photos to date and share an average of 95 million photos and videos per day.

Instagram is great for growing brand awareness and introducing products.

70% of Instagram users have spent time looking up a brand on the platform. Instagram allows you to promote your brand and product in a friendly, authentic way without directly selling to your customers.

Instagram photo and video sharing advantage has been leveraged at various events and tradeshows.

Whenever you are hosting events, you can always have an incentive for the attendees to post photos to Instagram using our event hashtag.

You can also offer a free giveaway or raffle for those who participate.

Pinterest is another very popular social media marketing tool.

Pinterest was founded March 2010 and has more than 150 million monthly active users (source).

Only use this channel if you have great images to share. Quality images are likely to go viral on this site due to its visual nature.

If your image is pinned by a highly-followed member, it has the potential to be viewed by millions.

It’s also great for promoting products.

6. YouTube

The total number of people who use YouTube – 1,300,000,000 and over 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute!

Almost 5 billion videos are watched on Youtube every single day. YouTube gets over 30 million visitors per day.

By 2025, half of viewers under 32 will not subscribe to a pay-TV service. This is because YouTube usage is growing.

More and more people are starting to use videos to create more customer engagement for their online businesses.

Aside from being the second largest search engine, YouTube is owned by Google.

So when it comes to search engine optimisation, videos are more likely to appear in search results than other websites.

For online and offline Business owners and internet marketers, YouTube Marketing is an essential strategy to take advantage of the web’s massive shift toward video.

That’s why it’s so important to learn and test some strategies below.

Social Media Marketing Strategy (A Step by Step Guide)

Step 1: Set Social Media Marketing Goals and Objectives

The first and foremost steps of your social media marketing strategy is to define goals and objectives.

Having a set objective allows you to quickly switch to a plan B when your social media campaigns aren’t producing the desired results.

Step 2: Conduct a Social Media Audit

Prior to creating your social media marketing plan, you need to assess your current social media use and how it’s working.

This means figuring out who is currently connecting with you via social, which social media sites your target market uses, and how your social media presence compares to your competitors’.

Step 3: Create or Enhance Your Social Media Accounts

Once you’ve concluded with your social media audit, it’s time to hone your online presence.

Choose which networks best meet your social media goals.

If you don’t already have social media profiles on each network you focus on, build them from the ground up with your comprehensive goals and audience in mind.

Step 4: Gather Social Media Marketing Inspiration

Not sure what kinds of content and information will get you the most engagement?

For inspiration, look to what others in your industry are sharing and use social media listening to see how you can distinguish yourself from competitors and appeal to prospects they might be missing.

Step 5: Choose Channels and Tactics

Many businesses create accounts on every popular social network without researching which platform will bring the most return.

You can avoid wasting your time in the wrong place by using the information from your buyer personas to determine which platform is best for you.

Step 6: Create a Content Strategy

Content and social media have a symbiotic relationship:

Without great content social media is meaningless and without social media, nobody will know about your content.

Step 7: Allocate Budget and Resources

To budget for social media marketing, look at the tactics you’ve chosen to achieve your business goals and objectives.

Make a comprehensive list of the tools you need (e.g., social media monitoring, email marketing and CRM), services you’ll outsource (e.g., graphic design or video production) and any advertising you’ll purchase.

Step 8: Assign Roles

Knowing who’s accountable for what increases productivity and avoids uncertainty and overlapping efforts.

Things may be a bit messy in the beginning, but:

…with time team members will distinguish their roles and what daily tasks they’re responsible for.

Other Possible Platforms for Social Media Marketing

Aside from he aforementioned social media marketing platforms, there are other possible options where you can reach your desired target audience, you just need to figure out where they hang out and engage them through that platform.

A great way to go about this is to model what others are doing. A simple competitor/peer report will work in this instance.

This involves researching which social media platforms your direct and indirect competitors are very active on. Benchmark international and local competitors to see get more ideas of trends.

In your report state whether they operate one social media platform or several social media platforms, which of this platforms are they getting the most engagement. You can use tools such as similarweb.com to analyse their website and see which platforms are responsible for their social traffic.

You can also ask your customers via email, which platforms they would like to use to interact with a brand of yours, which social media platform they like best and more questions to understand their reasons for choosing certain social platforms.

What’re your ultimate goals for being on social media?

It’s very important that before you go about creating a social media strategy, that you know what you’re the ultimate goal is. Try going beyond engagement and seeking growth, what else are you trying to achieve, what’s the ultimate goal at the end of the line.

Different businesses have different goals and these goals translate differently in terms of strategy on how to implement them. For example, some companies have the goal to drive just sales and profit towards their bottom line.

And their goal is to drive engagement to increase revenue, that’s what most companies are going for.

Now there are other services that are going for building a very deep rapport and connection with their customers, and they want to build an experience with their customers.

Both of these objectives are very important and well it all depends on your business and the particular objectives you are trying to achieve at some point.

If you want to learn more about social media marketing and how you can use it to grow your business, then register for our professional digital marketing course today.