SMM is the implementation of social networks to sponsor and sell products and services company. Social Networks also allow marketers to use many tactics and strategies to promote product-related contents, people engagement and fidelization.
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What Is Social Media Marketing?
Nowadays many companies use social media channels to enforce their brand and online presence, and to extend their business via web and other digital media. Social media marketing allows companies to promote their culture, identity and mission on web sites and social networks, to sell new products and services, to reach new customers and improve relationship with existing ones.
Social Media Marketing is based on the “word-to-mouth” effect: a content is diffused directly by the users and not just by the company. Which is why it’s possible to attract a wider audience; they could appeal to current and prospective customers, employees, bloggers, media, general public, and stakeholders.
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The main Social Media Strategies
Shared content transfers an implicit support when sent by someone who the users know and trust. New web 2.0 strategies increase the reach of markets to a majour number of users which may not have been involved otherwise. Social media strategy often implies:
- Viral Marketing, that is the creation of “viral” content that arouses the user’s attention and his will to “share” that information with others. This works like an actual virus, increasing and spreading to all contacts.
- User generated content, SMM encourages customers to create their own content. The comunication contents are created and shared directly by users, escaping companies control.
- Boycotting, Social Media has also some drawbacks. For instance a user could share a video against a particular product or service, because of some malfunctions or some disservice. For this reason today many companies have higher ethic standards (corporate social responsability), and have to send clear and not deceiving messages.
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The Major Metrics To Analyze SM Strategy
Companies can measure their social media strategy performance using various tools:
- Content metrics, to analyze content company share on social media and spot specific patterns. This way, companies can quickly see the breakdown contents created/shared by other users or influencers, testimonials, reviews, users shared posts, publications, likes, views and other.
- Audience metrics, helps a company to determine if the target audince engages with the selected contents. Like Total Followers, New Followers,New Accounts You Follow,Male and Female percentage, Age Group, Location.
- Competitor metrics, these look at what your competitors do on social media and can be beneficial to the company’s social media marketing strategies. This way, it’s possible to use information that company glean from its research to generate new ideas, strategies, and tactics to try.
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Which Are The Most Used Social Networks?
Not being present on social media today means not being competitive in the market. Each social network has a different purpose and audience, for this reason it’s important to choose the right one for the social marketing campaign.
- Facebook, the original social network. It allows people of any age to interact with each other through textual and multimedia content sharing. This generates a series of interactions, like viral and “mouth-to-mouth” spread that increases company’s visibility.
- Instagram, also property of Facebook, allows people to share images and videos, building their own personal story and interacting with others in a very engaging and viral way. Characterized by a younger audience but getting bigger and bigger.
- Twitter, mainly used for news-sharing and characterized by very short messages or “tweets”. Preferred by older influencers, like journalists and politicians. The users can create content by enclosing images, videos and link, and can also share existing tweets with “retweet” function.
- Tik Tok, initially for amateur music videos sharing and later, social sharing through short videos. It’s used by an increasing number of companies that want to reach young audience.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_marketing
