Social media has evolved into a space much larger than just a place to network and connect. It has become a marketplace for companies to display their products, services, and portfolio. This is where the concept of ‘Social Media Marketing’ comes into play, to help you maximize your reach.

Social media marketing means, using social media channels to promote your brand and/or sell your products or services. The different social media channels include LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Today, the umbrella of social media also includes platforms like Pinterest, YouTube, WhatsApp, Telegram, Snapchat, Clubhouse, and TikTok. Social media marketing is a vast space and includes:

• Promotion or launch of products/services on social media
• Interaction with customers
• Creating engaging content that showcases your offerings and values to the general public

Social Media Strategy

Though navigating social media seems easy, creating a niche for yourself is a continuous process that involves a lot of time, effort, communication, and creativity. This also means having a strategy in place. A social media strategy is a plan to help you communicate and connect across social media platforms. Here are some aspects that go into a good social media strategy:

• Content: Content refers to anything that you post on social media – text, images, videos, etc.
• Context: The package of your content and your motive behind posting the content.
• Hashtags: Hashtags are what take your content to a wider audience, making you easily discoverable. Apart from having hashtags that represent your brand, you should also explore the hashtags that are trending. This does not mean loading your content with hashtags, but instead striking the right balance based on the social media platform you are using.
• Shares: Shares are a form of engagement where your audience shares your content (either with their connections or on their feed). The more shares, the more the reach. This also indicates the connection your audience feels with your content.
• Engagement: Engagement is a term that refers to how people interact with your content. This includes aspects like liking, reacting, sharing, commenting, saving, or following a call-to-action (CTA).

Some of the elements of social media marketing are:

• Strategy: Having a social media strategy or plan can help you create valuable content, drive engagement, and gain more customers.
• Publish: A social media calendar is a visible plan of all your social media activities and ideas. It starts by identifying what you want to post for which particular day, charting out the kind of posts for each day of the week, identifying special days that relate to your line of business, and creating a calendar for all the days of the week, for every month of the year. Publishing your posts becomes easy when you create a calendar. Today, numerous tools help in automating the process of publishing according to the calendar.
• Engagement: Engagement is not just when your audience likes or comments on your posts; it is also when you like and respond to the comments of your audience.
• Analytics: Analyzing the performance of your social media posts plays an important role in understanding how the content is performing across platforms and what appeals to your audience. It also helps you discover the best times to post and make improvements accordingly.
• Advertising: Brands post on social media to sell their products/services. This makes social media platforms a great space for advertising. Social media advertising can be paid (you pay for your post to reach a wider audience), organic (your content is such that it picks up views on its own, i.e., you don’t pay for it), and earned (the likes, shares, and comments that your content gets).

Social Media Marketing Trends For 2023

The social media space is constantly evolving. What works for others may not necessarily work for you. This means you will have to experiment and be willing to explore. According to leading industrial sources, here are some of the trends to look out for in 2023:

• Short-form content: Short-form or bite-sized content like, videos are set to rule social media. This also means greater scope for edutainment (education and entertainment) videos. As a brand, you can leverage this by creating videos that not just offer your products or services, but also educate the audience.
• Social media for customer service: Having a social media presence means, customers would reach out to you for immediate solutions and fixes. Social media makes emails and calls related to customer service obsolete. The idea behind this is prompt response and easier communication. As a brand, you must ensure that you are available for your customers on social media.
• E-Commerce marketplace: Social media has evolved into a marketplace where you do not just talk about your offerings, but also provide an option for customers to purchase the product by tapping on the social media post.
• Social search: Using social media as a search engine is picking up scope, especially among GenZ, as social media platforms offer honest reviews and an idea about the brand.
• Content: Posting content on social media never goes out of trend and 2023 is all about relevant and trendy content to connect with the Be it memes, texts, or even videos, content plays a key role in pushing your brand.
• Influencers: Celebrities and micro-influencers play a key role in improving your brand’s visibility. You can collaborate with a celebrity or a social media influencer to not just promote your offerings, but also add a twist to the kind of content shared on your social media platform.

There are billions of people on social media and it is a great space to promote your products and increase your brand’s visibility. It might seem challenging to find the right course of action on social media, but with consistency and creative content, you can tap into its potential. Start by identifying the social media platform you would like to explore and work towards getting your products or services noticed. Get in touch with a digital marketing company like MicroSolutions, to establish yourself on social media platforms and maximize your reach.