“How to perform social media marketing?”
This question is one of the most frequently searched questions on the internet today.
The five pillars of Social Media Marketing relate to developing one’s competence in the world of digital marketing. Let’s get started to help you understand what this really means and how to get better at doing it to achieve your business goals. These 5 pillars occupy the shape of a subcategory of digital marketing that requires the use of social media platforms to promote such necessities as brands, products and services.
Social Media Marketing Objective
The primitive objective of social media marketing is to establish connection with the desired target audience; establish and build brand awareness; further build upon and drive website traffic, and, conclusively, achieve business objectives.
Users often have numerous social media options that they can pick from, for their business marketing objectives. These options include—Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, X (formerly Twitter) and Snapchat. Research suggests that if you’re objective is B2C, then Facebook and Pinterest are perfect platforms to go with. However, if you’re aiming for B2B, then X and LinkedIn are the ones to pursue your marketing objectives with.
Regardless, the beauty of this approach is that each available platform already has its own strengths, audience, and user demographics, so businesses may adapt their business strategies to each demographic in an effective manner.
To best make effective use of social media marketing, it is best to understand the key components of it – which might be referred to as the “five pillars” of social media marketing. Let’s delve into what these are, so you might better understand how to optimise your social media marketing strategy and achieve the success you set out for.
What Are The 5 Pillars Of Social Media Marketing?
1. Content Creation and Sharing
Content creation is the foremost essential of a digital and social media marketing strategy. If your brand is not creating content (which can take many forms, from posts, images, and infographics, to videos, podcasts and even memes), then it completely lacks an effective strategy and, quite simply, it is going to fail. Therefore, it is important to create cutting edge, professional content designed to optimise engagement (more on that shortly) and get potential audiences to notice the brand.
Furthermore, remaining consistent is the key; making a big-hitting post and then taking two weeks away from the social media platform before returning to achieve the same success is not going to work. Regular posts are too essential to neglect and doing so will only prove detrimental to your hopes of conquering social media.
2. Engagement
Unlike simply posting on social media and hoping that somehow you’ll get a thousand subscribers enquiring about that product you’re trying to sell—it’s mostly about the strategy you adopt. Often businesses confuse having a large following with succeeding their marketing objectives. However, it’s so untrue. It should be more about getting audience to engage with your business. You see, these are two different things—Encouraging your audience to hit the subscribe or follow button, and getting them to engage (comment, message, or call) with you.
If your audience regularly sees you engaging with its members, then they will be more inclined to participate and engage with your product. One of the best examples of this is the American fast food chain Wendy’s – which built an esteemed reputation as a business known for interacting with its audience in a fun, witty way and this has endeared it to an entire digital audience which might now purchase food a Wendy’s, simply because it is “cool” to do so.
With digital audiences tending to be younger, it is also a good long-term strategy to engage with this demographic. This might then encourage online audiences to create content that is relevant and promotional for the brand, and this is called “User-Generated Content” (UGC). Businesses who succeed in this area succeed in dominating opponents in the digital realm.
[See related article: Maximizing Social Media Engagement – Strategies For Social Media Success]
3. Social Media Advertising
The evolution of social media began in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It grew to an extent where it held sufficient demographic data, capable of helping businesses research, grow and succeed.
Take for instance, Facebook. The app in itself, besides the messenger, can be used to seek all kinds of data from its audience. Be it their geographical location, to their genders and the time of the day when they’re most likely to like, comment, or interact with you there.
This only tells us how data is everything. It is the key to success in a modern world where audiences are making purchases through targeted ads, and interacting with the influencers who share common interests with them. With that being said you can make use of different ads from video ads, carousel ads and so on, each customized according to your target audience needs and preference.
4. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a growing trend within the digital marketing world. Influencers are people who have gained some degree of notoriety within specific audiences on social media (for example: historian YouTubers with history YouTube fans, or gaming Twitch streamers with gaming Twitch fans, food fans with Instagrams dedicated to sharing food content, etc) and can prove beneficial to businesses as they have audiences who are likely to follow their word down to the last letter.
If you listen to a professional podcast, you will likely hear the podcast host deliver a few advertisements throughout the podcast episode – this is because a business has already reached them and concluded a deal which benefits the business in exchange for the financial benefit of the influencer. Identify an influencer, or micro influencer who might possess an audience that matches with your brand and build authentic, long-standing partnerships with them for the best results.
5. Social Listening
Many of you will be familiar with the term “vanity search”. This is often a derogatory term for someone, or a business that searches for their name on social media to find out who is talking about them. Whereas this might be laughed at on social media and is something of a meme, it is an excellent social marketing strategy that will help your business succeed.
Identifying the audiences talking about you; what they are talking about and how you might respond to it in an effective, beneficial way is tremendous business practice not emphasised enough in the social media marketing world.
Make use of social media monitoring tools, such as hashtags or ordinary tags, and you will unearth everything being said about your business and whether something isn’t working; something needs improvement or something is doing very well and gaining significant amounts of attention.
Sometimes, negative attention may be turned into a positive, too, so it should not be underestimated or, worse, squandered. This will also allow you to review customer feedback and reflect on what needs to be done to improve your business product if anything.
[Recommended reading: Social Listening – 10 Reasons To Pay More Attention]
In conclusion, social media and digital marketing is a tremendously diverse and evolving field. It is one which reaps major benefits and one that, if optimised, can turn a poorly performing business into one which brings not only great success, but long-standing success in a digital market that only continues to grow, with no danger of shrinkage.
Though it might require the ability to adapt, create well, and require a deeper understanding of the target audience, the ceiling is limitless.
If you follow and stick to the principles outlined as these 5 pillars of social media marketing you are only going to achieve success. How well you grasp the pillars will determine how quickly you succeed and the limits to your social media marketing strategy.
FAQs
1. What are the 5 pillars of Social Media Marketing?
The five core pillars of social media marketing involve firstly the social strategy which contrasts with simply just posting, rather setting a goal behind. Then comes the planning, engagement, analytics, and reporting.
2. What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing refers to the use of multiple social media platforms, such as facebook, instagram, or website, so as to drive traffic, audience engagement, and sales. Now this might look complicated, but you don’t have to pick all these platforms all at once.
3. What is the difference between social media marketing and digital marketing?
Digital marketing and social media marketing both different in their goals. Digital marketing aims to reach more audiences and boost sales—using several mediums such as email newsletters, TV commercials, social media channels, and SEO tools. Whereas social media marketing is used solely for gaining audience engagement via social media platforms such as facebook, instagram, and others. The key is to understand your audience’s personal interests and aligning your marketing strategy accordingly.
4. Do you need to be an expert in the social media market?
One doesn’t have to be an expert in the social media market to gain results. Often the game is all about testing theories, analyzing your audience data and doing what works the best.
[Main Photo by Djordje Petrovic; other images, videos, infographics or screen prints are credited in their respective Social Media Revolver articles]
Prajwal Manglekar is an SEO Specialist at Hexanovate. His data-driven experience in SEO has helped more than 50+ clients to build traffic, get leads and increase CRO. Prajwal’s vision is to help businesses with better rankings on search engine and resolve all their SEO issues.