How to start with social media marketing – 5 most important things to consider

My every week blog post has been around my learning and experiences from digital. This week’s post is inspired from the conversation with my friend who wanted to know the target audience on social media. This interaction made me realized that most of us are active on social media platforms but are we progressing? So this post “How to start with social Media marketing is aimed to guide you with basic things to consider while doing social media promotion.

All you need to know about social media

Social media marketing is not a fad but essentiality for every business. Whether we are individuals, an organization or a brand, our social media channels are representation of us and our lives(individuals who are not active on social media -this is not for you :)). But when it comes to businesses especially small businesses, it is important to realize that social media marketing is not just having a presence on channels but also creating a buzz among the audience.

Now when it comes to creating a buzz there can be two questions that can come in your mind –

• first is who we should target for creating a buzz
• Second is who we should target for followers on our channels

Now to answer these questions I would like to throw some light on basics that we all should be aware of when we think about promoting our brand/business on social media (This is an essential part of this post “How to start with social media marketing”)

Basics of Social Media Marketing

It is really important to know the difference between organic and paid for promotion on any platform

1. Organic Social Media – Social media posting on page

Organic in simple words are non – paid activities that we do on our social media channels. Through these activities we reach people who are already following us or have liked our page(or subscribed our channel)

Any activity that you are doing using the features of platform, for example

1. On Facebook – Posting posts/pictures/videos, updating cover photo, adding stories, updating profile information/bio, commenting on posts/creating a group all are part of organic activity . Read this guide on Facebook promotion
2. On Instagram – Posting images/videos, creating reels/IGTVs/stories, sending direct messages, and everything you do on your page for your followers is part of organic activity. Read this guide on Instagram promotion
3. Similarly on Twitter & LinkedIn – All the activities done on the page to reach our followers are organic activities

If you are using all the features on platforms but not spending than you are just dependent on organic promotion (non paid).
The important thing here to note is when brands go to agency for handling a page activity but not using any advertising tool on the platform it will still be called an organic activity (you are asking agencies to handle your page not paying anything to Facebook or channel)

2. Paid Social Media – Promoting posts & Campaign with objectives

Algorithms of all social media platforms are working in way that they have reduced the organic reach. For examples, if you have 1000 followers on Instagram/ Facebook, your new post is visible to 200 or 300 people or even less. Therefore, to reach your own followers you need to boost or promote post and that requires spends. For this, we have to use paid services provided by different channel.

So, paid social media has two parts

• Boosting a post

Here we have option to promote our post to our followers or even to the people who are not our followers. Most of the platforms offer evolved tool to target specific audience. We can target people basis interest, demographics, behavior, gender, age and what not. Read this guide on how to boost post on Facebook and know everything about boosting.

• Creation of campaign

Basis our objective all the platforms offer us options to run campaigns. There can be various campaign types from lead generation, followers, store visits to like ad & brand awareness campaign. Most of the time ads that you see while scrolling Facebook or Instagram feed are part of campaigns often called as sponsored ads. Know everything about paid promotion here

Now let’s move to the important section of this post (how to start with paid promotion)

5 important points to consider while starting with social media promotion and stay tuned to get answer to your question who should be target audience

1. Objective is the first and the most important step

As one should know the destination before taking a road similarly one should know objective before starting social media marketing. I have already written a detailed post on how to do online marketing, read this post to know about how one can decide their business objective before starting anything on digital. But with respect to social media marketing, I would like to clear confusion which most people have while selecting target audience

• Branding – Who can be the target audience

Branding in simple words is telling people about your brand – What is it, What it offers, Where it stands(positioning in market) . For example I have a luxuries salon and if some third person is talking about luxurious salon he should have an image of my salon as luxurious salon in his mind

Important point

While doing branding, one should have mix of people as target audience – not just one who are directly their customers or niche audience but someone who can relate, admire or probably can become customers in future. These people will like, engage & share your content so not customers but a broad group needs to be part of your TG while doing branding

For example, sabhyasachi brand would never want just people who can afford his clothes to be his followers. He would want everyone to admire, like or engage with its content

• Sales – Who can be the target audience

For sales, it is important to target people who are more likely to buy. To drive sales most of the time brands have to do paid activities so targeting needs to be as specific and detailed as possible. Read this post for more understanding

2. Social Media is not just Instagram

While most of people focus or put more efforts on Instagram these days, it is advisable to explore other digital platforms as well. Before sticking to one platform, it is required to know following

• Who is your audience
• Where is your audience
• Segment your audience into buckets like probable & easy to convert
• Your competitors
• Communication that can interest your audience

To have a complete details about each platform read this post on what is digital marketing

3. Read Insights well

You don’t need degree to analyze anything but inquisitive approach. Insights are basically results of your efforts so it is vital to read insights. (This is really important points so included in this post “how to start with social media marketing”.

Know the basic of every terminology and study the insights you get on your page. Your page has every data, you just need to read that and take steps in right direction. Subscribe below to know the basics of social media terminologies and to get the guide on how to read social media insights

4. Use Insights to plan further strategy

Insights can only tell you what is working for your audience and what is not working. Digital requires a lot of learning and experimentation and only insights can guide you on next steps. Basics the insights

• Communicate with your audience
• Create content – images, videos
• Eliminate or add new digital channel in your digital strategy.

5. Set goal, achieve and keep moving forward

Goal setting is really important to ace the digital game. Start with small but do keep something as a goal for next 3 months, 6 months or an year

Goal setting can be as simple as

• Reach benchmark of 500 followers
• First 100 sales
• Increase average engagement by 100%

Above post is specially written for small business so examples are taken basis that

Hope you like the post on how to start with social media marketing. All the best 🙂