Learn more about what social media marketing is in this article.
Social media marketing (SMM) is the use of social media platforms to promote products and services. This will help businesses build an online community with their target audience, drive online traffic to their business websites, generate more leads, recruit new employees, create an image or brand, and increase their sales and revenue. A social media strategy will vary based on which social networks the target audience of the business spends time on.
Social Media Marketing Platforms
Below are some major social media marketing platforms along with details about them, their target audiences, and what differentiates them from each other.
Facebook
Features:
Call-to-action button.
Character limit of 63,206 for posts.
Paid advertising, where companies can pay Facebook to place their ads on their website. The ad will run for a certain period of time to attract more visitors to frequently visited places on Facebook’s website. They can promote individual posts or their whole page.
Comments and likes.
Private messenger, allowing businesses to communicate with customers.
Scheduled posts.
Online store, allowing businesses to buy and sell products on the social media site.
News feed.
Friend requests.
Timeline.
Page moderation.
About section.
Groups.
Target audience:
Men and women aged 35-44 represent the largest audience on Facebook.
Businesses that want to share longer posts due to its very large character limit. Facebook is also suitable for both visual and non-visual content.
Twitter
Features:
Character limit of 280 for tweets. The character limit was increased from 140 on 8th November 2017. Originally, it was designed to fit the official limit for SMS text messages on mobile phones.
URL shortening service.
Trending topics.
Ability to attach poll questions to tweets.
Integrated photo-sharing service.
Tweet archival format. It is a zip file that contains an offline-browsable archive of all tweets.
Tip jar, allowing users to send monetary tips to certain accounts.
The shop module, directing customers to a brand’s products from its Twitter account.
Shops. Twitter enables companies to show up to 50 products for sale on their profiles.
Twitter spaces, allowing users to host or participate in a live-audio virtual environment called space for conversations. It has social audio features.
The main difference between Facebook and Twitter is that Twitter is designed for short textual tweets and Facebook is designed for visual and textual content. Hashtags, allowing users to create linked topics or keywords in their posts. These make it easier for people to find posts that interest them. Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube support hashtags, but they are more commonly used on Twitter.
Target audience:
Men and women aged 18-24 represent the largest audience on Twitter.
Businesses that want to quickly share short amounts of information using tweets, since the character limit is quite short. This will help businesses write more precise posts.
Instagram
Features:
Support for sharing entertaining videos or photos.
Character limit of 2200 for captions and limit of 30 hashtags.
Instagram stories.
Live room, allowing up to 3 people to have a video chat in a live broadcast.
Support for the posting of moments.
Instagram business tools include adding contact information and viewing insights about followers and posts.
Promoting posts within the Instagram app
Pinned comments.
The main difference between Facebook and Instagram is that Instagram only allows videos and images to be posted (visual content) and Facebook allows both text-only posts and visual content. Text-only posts cannot be shared on Instagram.
Target audience:
Teenagers represent the largest audience on Instagram.
Businesses that just want to share visual content, such as images and videos.
LinkedIn
Features:
Character limit of 3000 for posts.
Advertisements for jobs and business opportunities.
Profiles, where employees can list their CVs.
Internal knowledge graph, helping to connect everyone working in a field or organisation or network.
Mobile version of the website.
Support for signing into external services using LinkedIn.
Profiles
Campaigns
Private messaging.
Polls
Job listings. These are suggested jobs that users may be interested in, based on the user’s skills, education, location, and job preferences.
The main difference between Facebook and LinkedIn is that LinkedIn focuses more on business aspects of social media and Facebook focuses more on connecting with people’s family and friends.
Target audience:
Men and women aged 45-65 represent the largest audience on LinkedIn.
Businesses that are in need of more employees.
Snapchat
Features:
Automatic deletion of snaps after a 24-hour period. However, snaps can be permanently kept by saving them.
Monetisation
Profiles
Campaigns
Private messaging, allowing businesses to communicate with customers.
Support for video calls and calls without video, allowing businesses to communicate with customers.
Snapchat users can set their profile to public, allowing them to be discovered on the app.
Paid advertising, where businesses can create an ad in a few minutes with Ad Manager to promote their products.
Target audience:
Men and women aged 18-24 represent the largest audience on Snapchat.
Businesses that want to quickly share snaps with customers for a short duration of time, since they are automatically deleted. Snapchat focuses more on visual content than textual.
WhatsApp
Features:
Character limit of 65,536 for messages.
Location sharing
End-to-end encryption
Support for sending a single message to multiple people at once.
Last seen feature, allowing people to see the last time someone checked WhatsApp.
The difference between WhatsApp and Snapchat is that Snapchat automatically deletes posts after 24 hours, but WhatsApp does not automatically delete posts. Snapchat focuses more on visual content and WhatsApp focuses more on textual content. The last seen feature is also not available on Snapchat.
The main purpose of WhatsApp is to send messages to friends. It is not public in the same way as Facebook and Twitter.
Target audience:
Men and women aged 25-44 represent the largest audience on WhatsApp.
Businesses that want to have discussions with customers and want to send more textual content than visual.
Pinterest
Features:
Character limit of 500 characters for pins.
Pinterest Analytics, a service that generates website traffic statistics.
Allows users to share and find new interests using 'pins'.
Businesses can promote their content and products by posting 'pins'.
Virtual search function, allowing users to search for elements in images instead of words.
Targeting tools that allow businesses to reach people by demographics.
Unlike Facebook, Pinterest focuses more on visual content, such as images and videos than textual content.
Target audience:
Men and women aged 50-64 represent the largest audience of LinkedIn.
People that want to quickly find content that they are interested in by looking for pins. Pins can contain text and multimedia content, such as images. Businesses can promote their products using pins.
TikTok
Features:
Support for the creation of short videos that feature music in the background, which can be sped up, slowed down, or edited with a filter.
'For You' page, which is a feed of videos that are recommended to users based on their past activity.
'React' feature, allowing users to film their reaction to a specific video.
'Drafts' features, storing videos that users are not ready to post yet, similar to email.
Video limit of 10 minutes, which was increased from 3 minutes on 10th February 2022.
Support for the sending of emojis, videos, and messages with direct messaging.
Target audience
Men and women aged 20-29 represent the largest audience of TikTok.
Businesses that want to quickly share short videos. Video ads are available on TikTok that run for 5-60 seconds that businesses can use to advertise their products.
YouTube
Features:
A video-sharing site. Businesses can share videos of absolutely anything. YouTube only allows videos and does not allow people to post content with only images and text.
Comments and likes.
Video editor, where businesses can post featured videos at the end to promote other videos.
Trending videos
Non-verified accounts can upload videos up to 15 minutes in length and verified accounts can upload videos up to 12 hours in length or 256 GB in size.
Channel customisation, including photo, background image, and channel name.
Paid video ads that run at the beginning of YouTube videos.
Playlists, allowing businesses to put related videos into a collection.
Subscribe feature, where users can follow a YouTuber and receive notifications each time they upload a new video.
Suggested videos based on what people have watched before.
The main difference between YouTube and TikTok is that YouTube allows users to post longer videos, whilst TikTok only supports videos up to 10 minutes.
Target audience:
The 18-25 year age category makes up the largest audience on YouTube.
People that are looking for videos to watch rather than just text or images.
Businesses that want to share longer videos.
Data Gathering and Analysis
Social media marketing usually has built-in data analytics that allows marketers to track the success of their marketing efforts. They can track the success by monitoring the number of users who click through, the total impressions, and the total likes and shares, and use this data to identify ways that they can improve their social media marketing strategy or find even more ways to engage. When determining which metrics to track, it is best to align each business goal to a relevant metric.
According to Sprout Social, the most important social media marketing metrics to keep track of are focused on the customer. This includes engagement (likes, comments, shares, clicks), impressions (how many times a post shows up), reach (how many unique views an SMM post has), share of voice (how far a brand reaches in the online world), referrals (how a user lands on a site), and conversions (when a user performs a desired action on a website).
Advantages and Disadvantages Of Social Media Marketing
The advantages of social media marketing are:
It allows businesses to reach a wider audience. Since social media is used by people all around the world, marketing on social media can increase brand exposure to a wider audience.
Participation is usually free. Businesses can usually sign up for social media platforms and post on their profile with no costs, but for things like paid advertising, payment is required.
It promotes customer engagement. Engagement with customers is an important factor in increasing conversion rates and leads. Using social media, businesses can quickly respond to customer's questions and engage with them, helping to build long-term relationships and provide good customer service.
Increased website traffic. Social media posts are an effective way of driving referral traffic to a website. For example, promoting special offers and discounts is likely to gain interest from other people and encourage them to click through.
Businesses can get better insights using analytics and reporting features, helping to evaluate their performance on social media.
Businesses have a direct connection with their target audience. They will know who is interested because people will choose to follow the business's social media account or share posts. When businesses know their target audience, they can provide more valuable content to them, which can be personalised to their interests. It will also help businesses focus on parts of the market that are most likely to succeed.
The disadvantages of social media marketing are:
Negative comments and reviews. Negative comments can give a bad reputation of a business, especially if they were seen by a large number of people and it was a large business. Having too many negative comments or reviews can have a negative impact on a business's marketing efforts in the future.
It is a time-consuming process. Working on a social media campaign is a time-consuming process. Businesses need to constantly plan and publish new content and respond to customers on social media platforms. Social media is not a type of marketing method that a business only has to take part in once and they are finished.
It takes a while to see the end results. When businesses use social media for marketing purposes, they will likely have to wait a while to see the end results. Businesses will want to know whether their social media strategies are working and whether it is worth their time, but they will not see results straight away. Instead, businesses have to be patient and wait a while to see results before they can measure the success of their campaigns.
False or misleading information. Social media platforms are vulnerable to false or misleading information and fake news. Some users might believe these posts very quickly without verifying their validity. Customers may sometimes use social media to spread false rumours and accusations about a business. This could cause businesses to lose customers.
Risk of security breaches or hacking. Hackers can engage in malicious activities. If a social media account gets hacked, all private business information could go to the wrong person, and it could result in a data breach. The hacker could also use the victim’s account to post spam or misleading information. This is why businesses should choose a strong password and monitor it to ensure that there is no suspicious activity.
Social Media Marketing Tips
Below are 10 tips for social media marketing. Following the tips below will help ensure that your social media marketing campaign is as effective as possible.
Be consistent across each platform. Businesses should ensure that their brand name, icon, and logo on their social media pages are consistent and matches their actual business, which will help make it memorable. If a business created a social media page with a different name or logo than on other social media sites, it would make the business look less professional and less memorable.
Be reasonably active. If a business goes months without writing a new post, promoting a product, or updating its profile, it will suggest to potential customers that they are not interested in its social media page anymore and they may stop checking the business's social media page.
Choose the appropriate social media platform. All social media platforms come with their own advantages and limitations, so it is important to research a social media platform before using it. For example, Instagram only allows users to post visual content, so it would be unsuitable for businesses that want to write text-only posts and Twitter only allows for short posts of 280 characters, known as ‘tweets’, which would be unsuitable for a business that needs to share longer posts.
Accurately keep track of and measure marketing efforts to find out how successful the social media campaign is.
Engage with the target audience. Make sure to answer any questions that come up on posts. Also, make sure to respond quickly and don't leave people waiting for an extended period of time.
Use hashtags appropriately. Hashtags make it easier for other people to find posts on social media platforms as all posts that use that hashtag will display on a single page. Make sure that the hashtags are relevant to the posts and do not use too many hashtags on one post.
Create a specific plan for each social media platform. A specific plan needs to be in place for each social media platform that will be used, in the same way that marketers prepare for other aspects of their marketing plan. Make sure to consider how you will post content, when you will post content, and why you will be posting it before you actually post. If you are finding it difficult to answer these questions, it might be time to think more about why you will be using social media for marketing purposes.
Don't overpromote products and services. Overpromoting products can have the opposite effect. Instead of attracting customers, it can push them away. For example, asking people to buy products on 20 separate posts would be a form of overpromotion and would be considered spam.
Consider using images in each social media post. Images grab the attention of viewers better than text-only posts.
Make sure that you know your target audience before posting. You can learn information about your target audience using market research and social insights. Posting relevant content is much more difficult when you don't know what your target audience is or what they want.
