What is social media marketing…
Social media marketing is the process of leveraging various social networking sites to drive traffic to online content. The advent of mobile technology has made this advertising technique quite popular. Consumers often use their mobile devices to stay connected to their favorite social media sites, creating a promising opportunity for advertisers to catch their attention. Through social media marketing, a company could tap into an audience that they may have never been able to reach otherwise.
Social networks have created a powerful platform that can be used to engage a significant audience across many demographics.
These networks are often very popular, meaning that consumers will visit them frequently throughout the day. Companies eager to expand their audience and reach new consumers can turn to these sites to try and generate hype behind a certain product or service. This is often done through providing access to digital content.
Companies interested in engaging in social media marketing often create digital content for a particular service or product before launching any significant campaign.
This content can be accessed through the company’s website. If this content is simply allowed to sit on the site without being marketed, only a company’s most loyal consumers are likely to ever experience it. Through social media marketing, companies can easily drive traffic to this content by providing little more than a preview for consumers.
Because most social networking sites are different from one another, there are many different social media marketing tactics.
Twitter, for instance, allows companies access to millions of consumers. Companies using Twitter are limited in terms of the content they can expose these consumers to. Facebook allows for more detailed profiles and information to be shared with consumers. Instagram and Pintrest allow companies to engage consumers in a more visual fashion. YouTube has become an ideal platform for viral marketing campaigns and has proven very lucrative for some companies.
Though social media marketing is popular, there is no guarantee that a campaign based on this tactic will be successful. Social networking sites often provide advertisers with information concerning the online activities of a user. This information can be attained through a modest fee and used to custom tailor a marketing campaign to appeal to the interests of a particular group of consumers. Some advertisers also rely on consumer-to-consumer interactions in order to spread a marketing campaign amongst a target audience.