In today’s world where everything is getting digitalize businesses/brands/individuals want to grow on Social Media. There are 3 steps for that:
Step 1: Creating Social Media Presence i.e. creating social media profiles on different platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
Step 2: Social Media Optimization i.e. after making the social media profiles it is important to optimize the profile. This is what we already discussed in the last blog.
Step 3: Social Media Marketing is the last step. It basically grows your presence on social media and brings traffic to your website.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Sometimes people confuse in between Social Media Optimization (SMO) and Social Media Marketing (SMM) is same. As we had already discussed in the previous blog about Social Media Optimization, it is the optimization of social media profiles like brand name, logo, address, phone numbers, etc. Now let’s discuss all the activities we do in SMM:

1. Mostly Paid campaigns on Social Media

In Social Media Marketing we mostly run the paid campaigns. It is not necessary all the campaigns are paid; we don’t do any organic activities. Activities we do in creating content as per the platform, creating calendars, etc. come under organic activities.

Our main objective is to bring traffic to our website. For that, we majorly rely on paid campaigns in social media marketing.

2. Paid campaigns or Ads – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.

In Social Media Marketing we run ads on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. Social media are very powerful in terms of customization. While running ads we can have lots of choices for running ads like Placement of ads, Interest, Location, Age, Page audience, etc.

In SMM very hyper-targeted ads are runs so that we can run ads as per the targeted audience.

3. Content Understanding is required

Content understanding is very important because we are running paid campaigns or ads and in Social Media Marketing everything revolves around content. So it is very important that we should understand the content to post like: what is trending, what & which type of content is required at what time.

4. Content Calendar

For social media marketing, it is very important that you know about how to create calendars so that you know what has to be posted and when.

5. Advertising Skill is required

In social media marketing, we are running paid campaigns to beat the competitor. It is not easy to beat the competition when you have to:
• Manager budget,
• Make biding strategy,
• How to drive the campaigns,
• Which image to use
• What content to write on an ad

These are some activities to be performed so it is very important before running an ad you should have advertising skills, otherwise, your keep on investing in ads and you will not achieve the desired results.

6. Campaigns are created according to the objectives

Businesses have different objectives at different times. Sometimes they require awareness campaigns; sometimes they require leads or sales ads. According to objects campaigns need to change all the time.

In SMM it is crucial that we understand the need and change the campaigns according to the requirement of the business.

7. Power of retargeting can be utilized using Social Media Marketing

When lots of visitors are coming on our website from different sources, after they left, they go to their social media platforms, retargeting gives us the power to show our ads on their social media platforms.

We will learn retargeting separately in the future.

These are the steps we do in Social Media Marketing. So the basic difference between Social Media Optimization and Social Media Marketing is in SMO we do optimization of the social profiles to create the base for SMM, it is mostly free or organic and in SMM we do the marketing activities, it is mostly paid or inorganic.