Social Media Marketing: Types, Benefits, and Tools (Free & Paid)

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social Media Marketing is an online marketing technique used to connect with the billions of registered users of various social media platforms worldwide to promote, share, inform, interact and engage with the users regarding your company’s products and services.

Some widely used Social Media Marketing Platforms are Facebook (Fb), Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram.

Why Business Marketing on Social Media Platforms is important?

Active Users:

These platforms have active users across the globe. According to recent stats, the average daily time spent by an internet user on social media platforms worldwide is nearly 2hrs 30mins. Most of these users are through mobile social media apps.

Social Media for Mobile Marketing: 

Most users use mobiles to buy a product or get a service online because of its handy nature. At the same time, they look for notifications from social media apps, check the updates, post a tweet, or change the status. So, taking the combined advantage of promoting mobile users on the most used social media apps can maximize your conversions.

Quick Reviews:

If Users are satisfied with your product quality and offered service, they may recommend your products to other members online, and many quickly drop a review with positive feedback that can multiple your brand reputation online. It can also work as vice-versa and ruin your reputation.

Online Transactions:

With the increase and convenience of digital payments through mobile phones. if the user comes across your promoted ad and is interested in your product, the user may buy the product quickly through online payment or bookmark it to buy it later.

Social Bookmarking

Users can bookmark an image, video, article, post, and save(bookmark) it to view it later or share it with other online members. This can viral your content and increase social media engagement rate and social traffic.

Benefits of Social Media Marketing (SMM)

1. Global reach within a short period (provided with quality content).
2. Less cost
3. Time-saving
4. Consumer or user engagement
5. Can track the progress, reach, engagement rate, etc.
6. Customer reviews, feedback, interests.
7. Credibility, trust
8. Can target a specific audience
9. Generate leads, boost conversions and increase brand awareness
10. Helpful in studying user behaviour, trends, competitor marketing strategies and update 

Disadvantages of Social Media Marketing:

1. Content leakages before the release.
2. Negative reviews
3. Mishaps, misuse

Best Social Media Management tools (Free & Paid)

Canva: (Free and Paid):

Canva for Social Media content creation:

• To connect with social media accounts and schedule posts.
• canva is helpful for beginners without prior graphic designing experience to create images, infographics, designs, ppt, videos using thousands of ready-made designs, pre-designed templates, assets, elements, etc.

     2.HootSuite: (Free and Paid) 

Hootsuite for Social Media management and promotion:

• To connect with social media accounts and can collaborate with other team members.
• To schedule posts and monitor the results.
• It is free to connect up to 3 social media profiles.

3. Buzzsumo

Social Media influencer marketing tool

1. Helpful to do market research and find the trending pages, content, and topics, social media influencers on various social media sites.
2. Find the content gap between your site and competitor sites.
3. Social shares for your content and who are your promoters and audience.

4. Google Alerts

Using Google alerts for Businesses

 1. It is a free tool that notifies you whenever any user online mentions your brand name in forums, blog posts, social media sites, etc.

2. Find the best social media sites that are performing for your site and yield leads and conversions.

How Social Media Marketing Works?

Social Media platforms have changed the way how people connect. These platforms allow individuals to provide personal and professional information like name, address, location, qualifications, etc on their unique profile pages.

This information provided helps these social media platforms to suggest and connect with other users with similar interests on the platform and to serve the targeted ads promoted by businesses.

Businesses registered on these platforms can connect, promote and display their products and services ads to specifically targeted users.

5 Key pillars of an effective social media marketing strategy are:

• Determining a Goal:

Determining a goal, social media channels to be used, budget, resources to be allocated.

The goal can be anything that your business needs like increasing followers, post reach, subscribers, sales, etc.

• Planning, Creating, Scheduling, and Publishing

Organize your social media marketing by creating a social media calendar.

social media calendar helps you to create, plan and schedule your posts for one week or month in advance.

It also helps to track and manage and to coordinate your social media workflow with the marketing team.

• Monitoring and Testing:

Take time to monitor the reach and engagement of posts published to understand the user behavior on each platform.

Test user interaction for different kinds of posts (video, images, carousels) for different platforms with A/B testing to better understand the platforms, types of posts that engage the audience, and that works for your businesses.

You need to do social media optimization for a better reach and to increase user-engagement.

• Analytics and reporting

Every Social media platform comes with its reporting and tracking tool to check the reach and engagement of content posted.

You can also use google analytics to check the overview of traffic generated through each social media channel.

• Advertising:

For instant reach, you can go for paid social media marketing.