Step-by-Step Guide to Social Media Marketing for Small Businesses

Social media has provided multiple platforms on which businesses can brand, advertise and ingratiate themselves with their audience all at once, while also seeing what competitors are doing. To help you get started on a successful social media marketing campaign, business.com created this step-by-step guide on how to create a social media marketing strategy, what to avoid, and tips to make sure your campaigns are successful.

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Social media marketing is the creation of content that promotes your business or products on a social media platform, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn. Social media marketing has become an extremely popular way for businesses to connect with their audiences, since each platform reports millions – or even billions – of users each day. Since its advent, social media marketing has grown into its own field, complete with unique terms that are essential to understanding how it works.

Content: Content is anything you post, create or share on a social media site. It can be something you have created yourself, or something you share from someone else.

Engagement: Engagement is a general term for how many people interact with your content by liking, sharing or commenting on it. Engagement is generally the No. 1 goal in social media – you want real people to be actively engaging with your content.

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Follower count: This refers to how many followers you have on any given social media site.

Click-through rate (CTR): The CTR is a ratio that shows how many people have seen and clicked a link to your content, whether through an ad or another social media post. CTR is calculated by dividing the number of times your ad is shown by the number of clicks it receives.

Platform: “Social media platform” is another term for “social media site.” For example, Facebook and Twitter are both social media platforms.

Share: A share is when someone views your content and posts it to their own profile or account, thereby increasing the number of potential views for your content.

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Traffic: Traffic is how many people access your site via your social media channels. For example, someone who clicks on a Facebook post you shared and is then redirected to your website would be considered digital traffic.
Social media marketing has become a necessity for all modern businesses that wish to connect with customers where they are – online. Customers have come to expect some level of online presence from almost all the businesses they patronize, with over 75% of consumers reporting that they go online and research a business before choosing whether to make a purchase.

Increased brand awareness
There are over 3.8 billion people on social media in 2020, which means there are 3.8 billion opportunities to get your brand out to a new customer. Social media increases brand awareness through engagement, meaning that if you create a business page for your company and engage with other social media posts, you are increasing your brand awareness just by that simple act. Furthermore, social media can increase traffic to your website through posts, shares and comments.

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Lead generation and conversion boosts
Promoting and sharing content on social media is a great way to improve lead generation, which is the process of attracting and converting strangers into potential customers. You could also use social media to boost your conversion rates, since you’re actively promoting content to people who have already indicated that they are interested in your content.

Personal relationships with customers
A huge driver of social media marketing’s popularity is customers’ desire for genuine interaction. Before social media, brands felt distant and detached, but social media provided the ability to connect directly with customers and gave a more human touch to brands and businesses. Companies can participate in social media trends, chat with customers and share their human side.

Analysis of the competition
If you’re on social media, chances are your competitors are too, which gives you the chance to see what they’re doing on social media, what is working for them and what isn’t, so you can learn from their mistakes. Pay attention to what kinds of campaigns they are running, how they interact with customers, and how they promote their products or services. This allows you to make sure your campaigns are unique to your brand.