Social Media Marketing Concepts

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is it?

By definition, social media marketing is a form of digital marketing that uses social networking platforms to increase brand and product exposure and to cultivate relationships with consumers.

Benefits

Social media marketing has many benefits.

• Helps build relationships: One of the main benefits is it helps digital marketers build relationships with new and existing customers.
• Is agile: It’s also incredibly agile. This agility allows brands to leverage customer relationships and use them as real-time focus groups for new ideas and products, creating a nearly instant feedback loop.
• Is flexible: The adaptiveness of social media allows for flexibility with your creative assets and ads – because of the customer feedback loop. This is where you will know very quickly whether or not your creative is resonating with the desired audience because of their interactions, comments, and feedback.
• Yields ROI: Building meaningful relationships is at the core of social media marketing, so quickly adjusting creative – and targeting to drive high engagement rates and relevance to your audience – means that social media generally yields a high return on investment from promotional activity.

Responsibilities

It may seem obvious, but as a social media marketer, you need to be social to the core. You need to initiate, facilitate, encourage, and participate in conversations to help connect with others and, subsequently, build relationships. Building relationships in your community increases brand affinity and trust, which are hugely valuable attributes of an audience or consumer set. However, in order to build these relationships, it’s important to remember that social interactions should be a value exchange where all participants give a little and get a little in return. Make sure that, when you participate, you’re saying something that is either entertaining or useful to the people you’re engaging with. It should resonate with the community, or prove impactful to people in some way.

What are the main responsibilities of a social media marketer?

• Developing relevant content topics to reach the company’s target customers
• Creating, curating, and managing all published content
• Monitoring, listening, and responding to the community in a manner that ultimately drives business
• Nurturing and growing the community, and any influencer outreach efforts
• Overseeing the design of social assets – for example, profile cover, profile pic, thumbnails, ads, landing pages, blogs
• Managing promotions and social ad campaigns
• Analyzing, reviewing, and reporting ROI on metrics; creating best practices and optimizing strategy
• Monitoring trends in social media tools, applications, channels, design, and strategy
• Identifying threats and opportunities in user-generated content (UGC) surrounding the company, and reporting notable threats to management

Of course, this isn’t an exhaustive list, but it covers the main tasks involved.