The introduction of social media changed the way the internet is used and consumed. We don’t have to tell you how powerful social media has become.
Social media is one of the best ways to grow a brand. This is where social media marketing becomes important.
However, with this increased focus on social media, you need a better way to constantly manage and measure the results of your social media activities.
Enters Social media marketing tools. Dun Dun Dun!
If done right, Social media marketing tools can be a great support to your social media marketing strategy.
And without the right social media marketing tools, your social strategy may fall flat before it even has a chance to succeed. Womp womp womp.
That is why social media marketing tools are so crucial for your brand success.
But how to get stated with social media marketing tool? What is social media marketing? And what are the benefits.
In this article, we’ll be going through all these questions and more.
What is Social media marketing?
Social media marketing is all about promoting your brand online through various social channels.
Social media marketing uses social media platforms to connect with your audience, drive traffic to your website, and build your brand.
Some of the biggest social media sites are Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, and Pinterest.
In short, social media marketing is a way to increase awareness, traffic, leads, and revenue through your online social media presence. It’s all about creating content that resonates with your audience on the various social channels. This could include social posts, videos, images, and even podcasts.
There are two main types of social media marketing strategies: paid and organic.
Paid methods involve purchasing ads on ad networks like Facebook and Instagram.
Organic methods rely more on building up authority and credibility within your target market.
The latter usually involves constantly posting valuable content, engaging with followers and fans on social channels, and occasionally some great memes.
Our blog What is Social Media Marketing and How to Get Started With It? is a good entry point for understanding the basics of Social Media Marketing.
Do you know, according to Wikipedia, there are over 200 social networking websites? Well, that’s a huge number! However, we possibly can’t know about all the social networking sites and use them all.
Major Social Media Platforms:
LinkedIn:
LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network on the internet. You can use LinkedIn to find the right job or internship, connect with other professionals. LinkedIn can help startups and brands in finding their prospect customers and more.
Instagram:
Instagram is a free photo and video sharing platform available on Web, iOS, and Android. Users can follow each other on the platform. People can upload photos or videos to our service and share them with their followers. Also view, comment and like posts shared by their friends on Instagram. Since Instagram focuses on “trends and lifestyle”, it becomes easier to understand what your customers need from you.
Twitter:
Twitter is a service to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages. People post Tweets, which may contain photos, videos, links, and text. Twitter is well-known for its reach and public connectivity. The objective of Twitter is to monitor events, news, opinions, and most importantly ideological warfare. Anything happening in the world immediately starts to trend on Twitter.
Pinterest:
With billions of Pins on Pinterest, you’ll always find ideas to spark inspiration. When you discover Pins you love, save them to boards to keep your ideas organized and easy to find. If we try to understand the purpose of Pinterest, it would be best to say that its objective is to aspire. You’d find pins related to “arrangements, designs, art, styles, recipes” and much more. This is a place where you can show what you could do! (Well, that’s what you want for your startup. Right? To inform people about your values).
Facebook:
Facebook is a social networking site that makes it easy for you to connect and share with family and friends online. However, Facebook is also a place where people grow their business and other such interests. Facebook, again and again, iterates the fact that their main purpose is to “connect”. It is a platform where you find “emotion-driven content” (such as opinions and views) along with events and plans.
WhatsApp Business:
WhatsApp Business is an app that was built with the small business owner in mind. You can create a catalogue to showcase your products and services. Moreover, you can also connect with your customers easily by using tools to automate, sort and quickly respond to messages.
WhatsApp can also help medium and large businesses provide customer support and deliver important notifications to customers.
Telegram:
Telegram is also a messaging app with some extra added features. There are no precise ways to create a business account on telegram. However, there are two ways to use Telegram for business. You can create groups and channels, of course. Best is by creating a Telegram account as a business using a Telegram Bot. The Telegram Bot API is free and can be used to create bots for social, gaming, productivity, and e-commerce services. Added to this, Telegram Bots can also be used for human support by connecting them to a CRM or messaging platform.
Some basics of social media you need to know for your marketing
Content: is the most important thing, online or offline. Your content should be appropriate and aligned with your brand’s idea. Content can be anything that you share on your social media pages. Content can be seen as an umbrella term including images, memes, infographics, blogs, videos and more. It is the beginning of anything you put on social media. It’s like a foundation or starting point for your work.
Context: Different social media platforms have a different approach to content. Facebook and Instagram focus more on images and videos, whereas Twitter is more about short written content. Each one of these platforms has its own unique features and uses which make them suitable for different types of businesses. You need to study and analyse the platforms to get most out of them.
Hashtags: If a social media platform is a body, a hashtag can be seen as a vein which helps the blood to reach different parts of the body. Hashtags are used to add meta information on almost all social media platforms. Correct use of hashtags can help you get more attention and reach. However, try not to overuse it since the social media platform would treat it negatively. For example, you can use #digitalmarketing, #startups etc to reach audience looking for digital marketing services.
Shares and likes: The more shares and likes you’d get on your social media, the more it’ll connect you with people. Sharing is an essential element of social media marketing. It helps you analyze how many people reacted to your post. Likes would mean your audience is appreciating you, but the moment they start to share your content, it means they are connecting strongly with your brand’s vision.
Promoted/Sponsored Content: these posts are a type of ads that look like normal content only. But you have actually paid for these to the platforms. So, that it reached wider audience.
How it will reach more audience is the work of the platform. Every user will have a different motivation, and so the platform algorithm will do its best to correspond to those nuances.
So if you are promoting a business related to beauty and cosmetics, Platform would show your post to those people who mostly see those stuff on their feeds.
This helps in reaching more and most importantly relevant audience.
Promotions can be used to promote your page, websites, or events more aggressively and targetted way. Both ads and promotions are there to increase engagement and reach.
With these essentials in place, we can begin our social media marketing journey.
Remember, in the world of social media, the worst kind of activity is no activity. Hence, it is important to keep your audience updated over the latest products, services, and promotions.
Essential Rules of Social Media Marketing
You are coming up with amazing content. You are super active on all social media platforms. Yet, you are unable to grow your brand as you planned it to grow.
Below are a few tips you should follow.
- First and most essential: Create a social media strategy!
- Define and discover your target audience. You can’t sell books to a games’lover.
- Deal and learn with negative comments on social media. Social media tools can definitely help with this department.
- Try to humanize your brand. A faceless corporation or startup would not be able to gain a customer’s trust.
- Don’t spam and don’t be less interactive. Both are advised to be avoided.
- Don’t post for the sake of posting. Work on your content and come up with quality posts.
- Always track analytics.
- Establish yourself on the platforms that you think would help you grow.
- If your budget allows, get a digital marketing expert.
Once you have decided what type of social media strategy you want to pursue, it’s time to find the right tools to get started. The Social media management tools.
What are Social Media Management Tools?
A social media management tool is a software that lets you manage one or more social media profiles across one or more networks in one place.
They are a powerful tool for your businesses to reach prospects and customers more efficiently through social media. They allow your brand to flourish and engage directly with your audience.
Social media managements tools in general can help you:
- Save time
- Stay organized
- Optimize your efficiency
Benefits of Social media Tools
Schedule Posts At A Glance – Having access to a social media posting and scheduling calendar built-in to the tool allows you to plan ahead and ensure that you don’t miss important dates. If you don’t want to forget about your posts, you can always check your calendar to remind yourself when certain events occur.
Automate Your Schedules – Automation saves you time, but it also helps you avoid errors. If you only have a few things scheduled each day, then you won’t have to worry about forgetting something or accidentally skipping a date.
Analyze Performance And Improve Results – When you schedule posts consistently, it’s easy to see if you’re doing well or struggling. With these analytical tools, you can identify trends and patterns, determine what works, and tweak your approach accordingly.
Make Better Decisions – It’s hard to predict the future, especially when it comes to the success of your social media marketing efforts. By using these tools to review your statistics, you’ll be able to spot trends and patterns early on and make adjustments accordingly.
Create An Audience Of Interest To You – Creating an audience of people interested in your product or services allows you to market to them effectively. These tools make it easy to find people who would be receptive to your messages.
As with any new technology, the first thing you need to do is figure out how to use it properly. Once you have mastered that, you can start thinking about which programs or tools can help you reach your goals faster and easier.
If you are looking for the perfect tool to manage your social media accounts, then there are many options out there. Choosing which social media tools to use can be difficult, especially when there are hundreds to choose from.
SocialGrow
SocialGrow is one of the easiest social media tool to help you manage all your social media account in one place. SocialGrow helps you strengthen your social media branding. Moreover, it helps you acquire customers & engage better with people across social media.
Features of SocialGrow
You can schedule, publish & post your updates to all social media channels from a single dashboard
- Post about your services and products on social media with ease.
- Visually Plan & Schedule your Content with Calendar, Bulk scheduling, and more.
- Promote and market your post across Facebook, Instagram with Ad campaigns.
Interacting with customers and followers become easier thanks to SocialGrow. With the tools provided by us, engage with your customer faster and more efficiently.
- Comment and reply to your customer across all social media channels.
- Sync your inbox & comments from different social media to catch every conversation
- Collaborate & Strategize with your Team. Assign different roles to team members.
With SocialGrow, you can see a tailored live feed on your dashboard from all the social media channels.
- Get the latest trends in your industry, follow specific #hashtags and accounts.
- Monitor various activities from Industry leaders and competitors alike.
- Keep track and reply to your emails.
Moreover, you can get actionable insights on all your activities on social media.
- In-depth insights into your posts and updates on social media.
- Measure your performance and grow your reach.
- Know what’s working and what needs tweaking to nurture potential leads.
More attractive features of SocialGrow.
- Store all your social media posts and videos online safely and securely.
- Handle multiple accounts at one platform. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, YouTube.
- Within inbuilt access to Pixabay and Canva, you can edit and recreate images hassle-free without any need for other tools.
- You can easily handle your WhatsApp marketing though SocialGrow by directly communicating with your customers through their platform.
- The platform makes bulk scheduling and posting easier.
- You can also publish blogs to your WordPress website directly from the dashboard.
- It also provides automated chatbots to make it easier to talk with your visitors.
- Soon you’d be able to hire digital experts like content creators, marketers, influencers in a single click.
Conclusion
Social media marketing can be very successful for your brand when done well. Using social media marketing tools to efficiently manage your social media marketing helps you build an audience and gain exposure while at the same time increasing your social clout.
With the right tools like SocialGrow (Shameless Plug because we are confident about your success with SocialGrow), you can create, curate, publish, schedule, analyze and so much more.
Not only does this lead to more efficient work, it also means bigger business—attracting new audiences, driving brand awareness, and increasing engagement.
Most importantly, Your prospect customers and your rivals are already thriving on social media with help of optimized strategy and social media marketing tools. How can you afford not to social media marketing? 🙂
It may seem overwhelming trying to figure out which social media tools are right for you. However, once you become familiar with the basics, you’ll soon realize how useful these resources are.
Have you ever used social media marketing tools before? What were some of your favourites? Let us know in the comments below!
