Social Media Marketing​

The appearance of social networking websites has changed the way people interact and communicate, the way they exchange ideas and search for information. In the world where one in four people use some kind of social networking websites, the importance of these websites in everyday life cannot be neglected.

As a result, the communication, which is an important part of marketing, started to shift from traditional mediums such as television and newspaper ads, to social media. Thus social media has become a new platform for marketers to communicate and get in touch with the customers.

Social media is a new mediator between business who want to promote their product and between consumers who use social media to learn more about a particular product.

The following list of common features is often dead giveaways of a social media site. If you’re questioning whether a particular site could be classified as social or not, try looking for at least one of these features

• Personal user accounts
• Profile pages
• Friends, followers, groups, hashtags and so on
• Newsfeeds
• Personalization
• Notifications
• Information updating, saving or posting
• Like buttons and comment sections
• Review, rating or voting systems

The common stereotype comes out from misunderstanding the term “social media”. Most people think of social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter when they hear the term “social media”, but in fact this term refers to different websites that allow interaction among the users and the exchange of information through a variety of channels. Depending on the type of social profiles, social processes, type of interaction and type of content being exchanged, the types of social media established so far.

• Social Networks Sites
• Blogs and Micro-Blogs
• Media Sharing Sites or Content Communities
• Wikis or User-Generated Content
• News Sites And Social Bookmarking Sites
• Discussion Forums

Your success on social media entirely depends on the success of the content you post. Producing effective, high-performing content, however, presents a number of challenges for small businesses. It’s competitive, time consuming, and should ideally add value to your customer experience.

According to the latest statistics, the number of users who access the internet via a mobile device has surpassed the number of desktop users, which obviously shows the overall importance of mobile platforms in the usage of social media.

Engagement to the possibility of user taking part in a certain activity, such as liking, commenting, clicking or sharing as a result of your encouragement. As you represent a business on social media, your goal is to be active and engaging, in order to inspire your social media followers to do a certain action. The plan of activity on social network should be created in such a way that it engages and inspires the audience which will help you reach them in a way that it is available on the specific social network.

If a post is engaging, it means that users find it interesting, helpful, insightful, unique, etc. Having in mind that these kinds of characteristics define high quality content, it is obvious that people are more likely to respond if they see value in a post.

Target audience represents the group of potential consumers you want to reach, in this case via social media. It refers to those who are most likely to become your customers in the future, and that is why your goal is to establish a connection with them. You should start by asking yourself the following questions:

• What is my product (service)?
• Who is it for?
• Who will find it useful?
• Who will buy from me?
• Who will be interested in my business?
• Who were my clients in the past?

Creating social media accounts is only the beginning of using social media in marketing. The next part is posting content and interacting with the followers. Although posting content from other blogs and websites can help you, this is not always recommended practice, especially if you want to convert the visitors into buyers.

Content marketing refers to creating content in promotional purposes, and it can refer to various forms of content, such as blog articles, e-books, images, etc. This kind of content can be shared on social media accounts in the purpose of engaging users and increasing traffic on your blog or website.

• Photos
• Graphics
• Videos
• Review videos
• Tutorial videos
• Links

Social bookmarking is an activity of adding and sharing website links on different online services that allow sharing content and social bookmarking. Social bookmarking websites allows users to add, edit and publish the links, with the possibility of tagging the link

Social bookmarking websites generate a large amount of links, which are submitted by the users. Tagging is used by these websites to organize a bookmarking system, and to provide users of the website to easily browse through the existing links.

Social bookmarking websites are often used as a part of social media marketing in the purpose of promoting website content to online communities. Social bookmarking website can be connected to the social media accounts, which are linked to your blog, creating an expanded network of resources for promoting content and building your online community.

When being active on social media, you will establish a plan that will include a certain set of activities. Whether you will be conducting the social media strategy on your own or you will hire a person who will do that for you, you need to establish a set of rules, what to do and what not to do when being active on social media. This will help you with being consistent and using the planned methods and approached in the process of realization of social media marketing strategy.

Even though social media has become a favourite kind of entertainment for people nowadays, when it comes to using social media in marketing, one has to have a developed strategy, or a plan, as well as tools necessary for conducting and evaluating the strategy. In order to understand how social media is used in marketing, let us examine the following elements that complete a social media marketing strategy:

• Goals
• Planning
• Monitoring
• Monitoring
• Analysis

If using social media in business is new to you, you are probably not aware of some simple things you can do to improve your social media profile easily. Customization refers to using different setting options in order to make a social media profile as unique as possible in order to present your business. Each social network offers some of the options for customization and those usually include:

• Profile image is usually a smaller image that represents your page or profile. It is visible next to the posts and status updates you publish on the specific social network, including both posting on your own page or profile, and posting on other profiles, pages or groups.
  
  
• Some social networks, such as Facebook and Google+, allowadding a cover photo. This photo is larger than the profile photo and it is usually displayed across the top part of the user profile or page. Larger image allows you to take advantage of visual content and present your company.

Social media optimization is often described as the usage of social media accounts in the purpose of promotion through increasing awareness of the brand or product. The goal of social media optimization is similar as the goal of search engine optimization.

It is used for generating traffic and raising awareness, but instead of using the website, like in SEO, social media optimization uses social media channels to achieve this goal.

Branding is an important aspect of marketing, as it enables establishing a name that is recognized and respected. Different methods have been used in this purpose as this is a complex process that involves different channels and methods, and social media has become the inseparable part of i