If you’re new to social media marketing for business, you’ll need answers to some of the most basic questions first, before delving into your own social media campaign.
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What is social media?
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What are the most prominent forms of social media content?
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What is social media marketing?
This post is absolutely entry-level. If you already know the basics and want to learn more about creating and achieving a winning social media strategy, you’ll want to read this.
What Is Social Media?
Social Media sites essentially allow people to connect with one another, typically around similar interests or real life relationships. Creating and building on these connections is the “social” element. The goal of social media and of most social networks is to foster human connections and build an online model of an engaged and interactive community, but this can be enhanced in certain cases by structuring the network around an industry, a profession, a hobby or any other interest. This essentially allows like-minded individuals to communicate in a way that would be very hard to achieve in an offline environment, allowing novices to interact with and learn from true professionals, or allowing leaders in a field to establish a forum and share ideas. These ideas take the form of content and make up the “media” portion of the phrase “Social Media”.
What are the most prominent forms of social media content?
Social media is any content submitted to a social network or online community. The most common forms this media takes are as follows:
Text:
From a simple thought, shot out in 140 characters on Twitter, to a complex discussion or post on LinkedIn, text allows the discussion of your own ideas.
Images:
Pinterest, Instagram, to a large extent, Facebook. Many social media sites are built around the sharing of images. Possibly just a pic of your baby to delight the grandparents, or maybe detailed shots in chronological order showing how you created something amazing.
Links:
Share the content you’ve found (or created) elsewhere online with a simple link. Possible in most social media sites.
Videos:
Much like image sharing, you can upload and share videos, whether personal or commercial.
Memes:
Basically just a captioned image. Common examples: Success kid, Awkward Penguin, Insanity Wolf, Drunk Baby, Good Guy Greg. (Spend any time on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc and you’ll run into these!)
GIFs:
Short video snippets saved in .GIF (and now html5 video) formats allow you to share a hilarious or interesting event. Typically just a few seconds long and shown on repeat so you can really enjoy each moment.
We go into more detail on the above in our post on choosing the right social network for your business social media marketing campaign. Alright, with that out of the way…
What Is Social Media Marketing?
Using the definition of social media above, we can say that social media marketing is the use of these channels to extend brand awareness and increase customer acquisition, sales, and profits for a business. Social media marketing has become one of the most versatile marketing trends known today.
There are various benefits to marketing via social media. For starters, the overhead costs range from minimal to free. This allows startups and small businesses to compete against large, established brands with massive marketing budgets. Creativity is rewarded more than a massive budget, although that certainly doesn’t hurt!
Feel like you’ve got the basics down? Maybe you should take a look at how to put this info into action and achieve a winning social media strategy for your business!
