Whether you’re starting a new business or have owned a successful business for years, your company will be missing out on untapped market potential if you fail to utilize the many different types of marketing available to business owners today, including social media marketing. While many businesses tend to believe that younger generations are the sole users of social media, it’s important to understand that all generations are engaged with social media in today’s world.

When looking at the demographics of social media users, nearly 40 percent of adults above the age of 65 use at least one social media site, which is up by a significant 13 percent since 2014. A similar increase from 52 percent to 69 percent has occurred in the same time frame with people between the ages of 50-64. Both of these statistics show that older generations are using social media platforms at an increasing rate. However, depending on your business or company, it is important to understand who your target audience of these social media users in order to effectively market to the intended audience.

Currently, social media is considered to be one of the primary channels of exposure for many online businesses. When you advertise your business on various social media platforms, you’ll benefit from these efforts in numerous ways.

You’ll be able to learn more about your customer base via big data analytics which include interests, demographics, and engagement. By expanding your social media presence and effectively implementing marketing strategies, your business will grow exponentially throughout time.  With this in mind, here is a thorough guide to social media marketing and why it’s essential for every business.

What Is Social Media Management?

Social media management is an aspect of digital marketing that centers around managing your online content and interactions across all social media channels, which can include everything from Youtube and Facebook to Twitter and Instagram. While social media management should be a critical component of any company’s marketing strategy, the majority of businesses don’t have the necessary budget to create an internal social media marketing team. Time is also a large factor in why businesses don’t manage their social presence themselves.

Instead, a business must be focused on every other facet of running a company, which means that there’s very little time to conduct comprehensive social media marketing campaigns. As such, many of these businesses are choosing to outsource their social media management to social media marketing and management firms that are entirely independent. There are numerous reputable firms that offer extensive social media management services. These companies will organize, maintain, and structure all of the content that your business places on social media platforms, which gives you time to work on everything else that has to do with running a business.

Some of the features that can be provided with social media management services include a dedicated social media manager, constant social media monitoring, post curation, and a focus on community growth. These services are beneficial because you’ll have a professional team working on bolstering your social media presence. By hiring a company that’s known for providing these services, you’ll eliminate the risk of making poor hires if you attempt to create an internal social media team.

Social media management involves many different factors depending on the platform your business is advertising on. The firm that you select to represent your company will create business pages and profiles on one or more social media platforms. They will also use a variety of tools to engage with your audience on social channels, which could include everything from hosting a social media giveaway to regularly responding to comments that are made on your business page. All of the latest social media features will be leveraged in order to engage with your audience, which include such modern features as Snapchat advertisements and Instagram Stories.

Social Media Advertising 101

Social media advertising is much simpler than it might seem at first glance. For starters, there are a myriad of effective ways to advertise your business and brand on social media. If you happen to use Facebook, your advertisements will utilize Facebook Ads. When using this service, you’ll be able to choose your marketing objective, select a target audience, decide where to run the ad, set your budget, pick a format, and place your order. When looking at the various formats available to you via Facebook ads, the eight available formats include photo ads, video ads, stories, messenger ads, distinct carousel ads, slideshows, collection ads, and playable ads.

If you’re marketing on Instagram, the four types of ads that they offer include photo, video, carousel, and collection ads. Twitter advertisements are decidedly different than many of their counterparts. Whether employing a Twitter Promote ad or a Twitter ad campaign, the five business objectives you can work towards include website clicks, followers, app installs, awareness, and Tweet engagements.

Technology is advancing in our world with each passing day, which is among the primary reasons why social media usage is growing among all age groups and will likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future. As such, it’s clear that social media plays a part in every business. If your business uses social media and does so effectively, you’ll almost certainly experience more engagement with your brand than you would if you didn’t make use of social media marketing. If you require assistance with your social media marketing, there are some fantastic tools that can help you transition to these platforms, which include HubSpot, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social. These social media and management platforms are considered to be among the best in the business.

The key towards creating an effective social media marketing plan is to fully understand what your budget is going to be before you purchase any ads or even begin to create site pages and profiles for your company. When budgeting for social media advertising, you should first calculate what your total marketing spend is going to be. There is no magic number as each business is unique but the majority of successful businesses spend anywhere from 5-15 percent of their annual revenues on marketing.

When taking the entire marketing budget into account, it’s recommended that around 40-50 percent of this budget is spent on digital marketing. The majority of companies will then use 20-25 percent of their digital marketing budget on social media marketing (again, depending on your business, industry, and target consumer). Keep in mind that Facebook, Youtube, and Instagram are the most popular social media channels for advertisements, which is likely where you should spend the brunt of your budget.

The social media content that you choose to post largely depends on the platform you’re advertising on. When attempting to engage with your audience, creativity is a must. Ads that are deemed to be engaging and creative can more effectively gain momentum and connect with audiences. No matter which platform you advertise on, it’s important that you make weekly posts at the very least. Taking too long between posts will only serve to make your audience disinterested. Themed posts and holiday posts are also very appealing to modern audiences. This content is considered to be more authentic. You should also mix in some giveaways and contests every now and then.

Pros and Cons of Social Media Advertising

Social media advertising is a highly beneficial type of marketing that can greatly increase the awareness of your brand or business among online all types of social media users. Because of how many people use social media platforms across all age groups, you can target your social media marketing to specifically reach your brand’s primary audience. However, there are also some cons that you should be aware of, the primary of which is that social media is very crowded. No matter which platform you advertise on, you’re going to have a significant amount of competition, which means that your content must be consistently high quality and relevant to the needs and interests of your core audience.

Regardless of the pros and cons to this type of advertising, it’s important to understand that certain strategies may work better for one company when compared to another. If you want your social media marketing campaign to be effective and to provide you with a high ROI, it’s essential that you measure big data via analytics to create an effective campaign.

Pros of Social Media Advertising

• Allows you to attract a specific generation of audience
• Allows you to engage in microtargeting
• Provides you with additional brand recognition you can’t get anywhere else
• Social proof can greatly increase brand awareness
• Provides you with the ability to build a loyal customer base on platforms where you can engage with this base regularly

Cons of Social Media Advertising

• This type of marketing can be costly if you need to hire another business to manage your social media advertising
• If you attempt to handle your own social media advertising, you’ll find that doing so can be very time-consuming because of the high amount of attention it requires
• The market is an increasingly competitive one, which means that your content must be consistent and current and that you’ll need to get creative if you want to compete

How to Track Your Social Media Business Efforts

If you want your social media marketing efforts to be successful and provide you with the ROI you’re looking for, it’s important that you alter your marketing campaign from time to time to react to what your customers want. It’s unlikely that your initial efforts are going to be perfect, which means that some fine-tuning is likely necessary. By tracking your social media traffic, you’ll be able to determine which ads and pieces of content were appealing to your users and which ads didn’t work as well as intended. This data will tell you how well social media advertising is doing for your business.

There are a variety of ways in which you can measure the analytics of your social media marketing. When using platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, you’ll find that they have their own analytics tools that your business can make use of, each of which will provide you with many useful data points. Likely the best option is Google Analytics, which can measure social media exposure by channel. If you’re using multiple social media platforms, Google Analytics will provide you with a place where you can measure all of the results in one location. There are also a variety of great third-party apps that can measure data for you, which include both HubSpot and Sprout Social.

Conclusion

Growing your social media presence is necessary for any business. With constant activity on social media, your business will continuously attract users to your business through network effects allowing your message to reach not only the people within your network but the people connected to that network through second and third degree connections. If you are the owner of a business and you are interested in working with Bryt Designs to improve web design, web development, and search marketing, contact our team today!