An Overview of Social Media

The word “social media”, which means how people interconnect with each other through websites and other online outlets, has become more popularly used in the last 5 years thanks to the world wide web.

Social media makes sharing messages, photos, personal thoughts, etc. to mass amount of people very easy and accessible to anyone. “Retailers who use social media as an integral part of their marketing strategy usually see measurable results” (Hudson 2019). But not all “measurable results” are positive, there can also be a negative outcome depending how that business markets itself. The idea for business to use social media marketing is to create long lasting relationships with their targeted customers, which comes through engagements and how well that business listens to their customers.

Why Social Media Marketing Is Important

Why is Social Media Marketing so important? Well to be straight up and direct its because everyone is using social media, whether it’s your targeted customers or just people you know, which means you can acquire a large amount of following just by using the social media platforms. But that also means any of your competitors that use social media can cause you to lose any potential customers and/or any of your regular customers just as quick as well.

Different types of businesses use social media for just about anything. “For example, a business that is concerned about what people are saying about its brand would monitor social media conversations and response to relevant mentions (social media listening and engagement)” (Buffer). Its also very easy for businesses to track how they do with gaining new customers and sales from the advertisements they put out.

The Main Components for using Social Media Marketing Successfully

The main components for successfully using Social Media for marketing to your targeted audience, which is used by almost every business, is Strategy, Planning, Listening, and Analyze.

Strategy is when the business’ marketing team comes together and decide what kind of content they want to publish, or what social media platform do they want to use to reach their customers.

Planning comes after strategy and is when the marketing team plan what time of day they’ll publish their post, image, and/or video for the masses to read or view. Planning also consists of how frequently that business will publish something throughout the week.

Listening is what good businesses do, especially businesses with a large amount of following on social media platforms. Listening can be something simply as a reply to a comment from a customer on a post they made or helping a customer that directly messaged the company’s profile account for help. When businesses succeed in listening to their customers, they’ll usually have a larger customer loyalty amount.

Analyze comes at the end after the business has been frequently posting for a long period of time and can see how well they’re doing overall with marketing on social media. There’s a lot of things to analyze when it comes to social media marketing, such as how many more customers have you gained within the last 3 months or how many mentions from customers are positive and/or negative. Businesses can also analyze which of their posts or social media platforms have been the most successful.

Therefore it is important in this time of social media impact for businesses and individuals to know which platform to utilize. This can be achieved through strategy, planning, and analyzing the different platforms to select the one that fits them and their customers the best.





Works Cited

Hudson, Matthew. “Learn What Social Media Is and How to Use It to Grow Your Business.” The Balance Small Business, The Balance Small Business, 8 May 2019, www.thebalancesmb.com/what-is-social-media-2890301.

“What Is Social Media Marketing?” Buffer, www.buffer.com/social-media-marketing.