24 July 2024 | By - Sudha Mariappan

Do you know as of 2024, how many hours you’re using your smartphones?

A whopping 6 hours and 35 minutes on an average daily!

From waking up to going to bed, the smartphone is the one that keeps us company. It gives us directions in a new city, orders us food, buys us things and lets us talk to people who are far away.

According to the Independent, an average human uses more than 6 hours a day on the devices forever etched into their palms. There would be no surprise if the time goes beyond 6 hours, as people are drawn into social media.

With people’s attention span deteriorating, no doubt businesses switch to social media for promoting their products.

But understanding how businesses use social media marketing to recognize their brand is crucial for gaining more customers, getting more profit and the overall improvement of your business.

Not only that, having social media marketing as a part of your overall marketing strategy will gain you a massive follower base, who will resonate with your brand and have personal dealings with them.

Understanding Social Media.

Earlier days, we used to communicate entirely through word-of-mouth marketing. Then technology happened, and now we cannot imagine our lives without these social media apps.

You can stay connected with friends, communicate with strangers across the world, and even get influenced enough to make purchasing decisions. These applications become a tool for marketers to promote their products through various forms, including influencer marketing and user generated content.

We can really quantify our reach and growth through the quantity of likes, comments and shares. According to Datareportal, 462.0 million social media users as of 2024, which means as a marketer, you have a huge potential of having a booming business!

Some of the most popular social media platforms include:

• Facebook: The age-old app that we started to use for connecting with friends, sharing updates, and joining community groups.
• Instagram: As a completely visually stimulating app, Instagram is a photo and video-sharing app popular for its visual aesthetics and stories.
• X (Twitter): Be it political agenda, or a famous celebrity, their words matter here no matter how short. X (formerly Twitter) is often used for news and trending topics which are short and precise.
• LinkedIn: Just like facebook, but completely professional, it is an app for seeking networks for job seekers, employers, and business professionals.

These apps turn out to be the most influential and successful social media apps that billions of people all around the world have on their smartphones. We’ll discuss them in detail below.

But first, evolution in this tech atmosphere has been significant over the years. We used to have simple websites for connecting with people, now those websites have turned into complex systems that stand to serve different purposes.

We used to have a simple facebook which over the years gave birth to giants such as Instagram and Twitter. These platforms evolved from being just small communication tools to become big marketplaces.

Read Also: All you need to know about Social Media and its importance in 2024

Why is Social Media Important?

No matter what our elder generations might say, social media has done more good than harm over the past few years, which makes social media important. These are an important platform to take advantage of if used correctly.

1. Communication and Connection: Communication with your family or friends is easy in social media, as it closes distances. It also helps in connecting people with similar interests or professional goals.
2. Awareness: The need for information and awareness is one of the major reasons why people prefer using social media. It is the receipt of news and information that most people get from social media.
   Social media news spreads like a wildfire, and through them a user comes to know about events in the world in a very short period of time.
3. Branding and Business: Social media has become an important tool in marketing for businesses. They use it to increase their audience, connect with their customers, and retain brand loyalty. Furthermore, there is a reduction of costs involved in social media advertising, compared to traditional means of going about it.
4. Creativity and Self-Expression: Social media provides a platform for self-expression through writing, photography, video, and other forms of content.
5. Influence and Trends: Social media influencers turn out to be strong voices that help create trends and public opinion. Brands often collaborate with influencers for an effective reach to target audiences.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Gone are the days where you had to book a slot on television advertisements to promote your product, or hire a salesman in a TV show to talk about your product.

Now it’s the time of social media marketing, which is the art of creating content that appeals to social media sites and user engagement to increase the size of the audience and customer numbers.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a type of marketing where businesses, or anyone who wants to promote their product or services use social media as their primary platform. Social media, used for sharing information and connecting with people is the easiest and fastest way to keep the engagement and bring new customers.

SMM uses built-data analytics that allows marketers to know about their engagement with their customers and track their success.

This requires a good way of developing content, the kind of content that would draw a response from an audience and propel them to take action, particularly by purchasing your product or sharing the content.

Social media marketing is all about meeting your potential audience and clients where they are, as they interact with each other and your brand socially.

With billions of users spending time on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, businesses can customize their reach to specific demographic targets based on behaviors and interests by paying advertisements.

Social media marketing is also a very cost-effective method, particularly against other media, like television and print advertising.

One of the big parts of social media marketing is content creation. The shared content must be relevant, engaging, and valuable on any social media platform. It could come in the form of a blog post, infographic, video, podcasts, or basics in the form of status updates.

The content must be targeted and customized toward the platform. For example, we can’t post our dog pictures and call it a day on LinkedIn, as it’s a professional platform. In addition, it includes regular involvement with the audience through responding to comments, messages, and feedback for a strong relationship and brand loyalty.

Data tracking and analytics are also the two critical areas of social media marketing. Businesses could use and interpret data received from their websites and social networks, measure the effectiveness of their marketing strategies on the social media platform.

This reveals data that may or may not work and answer these questions, what works better with content types? What demographics are engaging the most? What times are best to get engagement? Such insights will enable the company to improve the strategy over time for the superior ROI (Return On Investment) and make sure that the marketing efforts are as effective as they can be.

Better yet, the beauty of social media marketing also allows businesses to engage in paid ads to boost their post or pay influencers to promote their product.

Inshort, this form of marketing is a boon for marketers seeking to achieve brand visibility, engagement, leads, and sales generation on their website in a very short while.

Read Also: What is a Social Media Algorithm? How Does It Work?

How is social media marketing used?

1. Brand Recognition: Through social media marketing, a business will be able to get in front of numerous customers. Regular posting will ensure that a brand remains in potential customers' minds
2. Content Distribution: A business can distribute its content sharing on social media various blogs, videos, infographics and more. Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are some popular platforms to distribute content to relevant customers.
3. Customer Interaction: Through social media, customers can interact personally in less time with comments, messages, and posts. These interactions allow brands to answer customer queries, get feedback, and build relationships.
4. Lead Generation: They use tools for leads generation, such as sign-up forms, special offers, or gated content. Businesses use social media paid advertising to attract the required leads and send them to a website or landing page.
5. Customer Support: Most businesses use social media for customer service in handling inquiries, resolving issues, and rendering any necessary support. Quick and helpful responses on social media can enhance customer satisfaction as well as loyalty.
6. Targeted Advertising: Social media channels also utilize precise targeting features for their advertisements that can efficiently target specific demographics, interests and behaviors. Paid social media campaigns are those campaigns marketing products, services, or events to a specified group of people by using social media.
7. Market Research: Social media is proven to provide details on consumer preferences, market trends, or competitor activities. Business companies can also keep a close eye on what is being said on social media platforms for the purposes of keeping up with market changes, or changes in a specific niche, and knowing how to adjust strategies.
8. Influencer Partnerships: Through partnerships with social media influencers, brands reach new audiences and boost their credibility. The influencers promote products or services to their audience, thereby bringing brand awareness and, most likely, a good sales rate.
9. Event Promotion: Social media events include webinar promotions, product launches, and in-person meetups. Businesses create event pages, share updates, and engage with attendees before, during, and after the event.
10. Generating Website Traffic: Many times, businesses post directly or even put out ads, sharing relevant links which further leads to websites or gets directed to a designated landing page. That will drive the traffic to a website, making more information accessible to a visitor or potential buyer.
11. User-Generated Content: They encourage customers to share their experience and produce their own content such as reviews, photos, testimonials, etc. UGC builds trust and authenticity as potential customers get to see how real life is with the brand.
12. Competitor Analysis: Businesses monitor and analyze competitors' social media activities in order to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. This would allow them to fine-tune their strategies accordingly and keep ahead of the competition.
13. Integration of Sales Funnel: Social media marketing integrates with the sales funnel through nurturing prospects from the awareness stage to the conversion stage. Businesses tap into the right social signals while providing customized content and retargeting ads to guide users through the buying journey.
14. Crisis management: This tool is used in times of crisis or bad publicity to quickly and appropriately inform the public, and to manage the brand's reputation. Immediate response provided with transparency to lower the damage while, of course, restoring the customers' trust.

Top 5 social media platforms currently on trend:

Facebook:

Social networking was never the same since Facebook came out. New and advanced apps came by, yet Facebook is still up there as a perfect place for sharing life updates with friends and connecting with a variety of social communities.

Be it sharing your photos on Facebook from your most recent vacation or even following along in a group discussion about just about anything by joining online communities, there is most definitely something for every person on the site. Although the new generation don’t use facebook often as the old folks, Facebook is the mother of social media.

In the business world, it gives them an effective means of reaching customers, marketing products, and selling directly using Facebook Marketplace.

Events and community groups are also at the heart of Facebook's toughness, thus being helpful to whatever purposes the person has, personal or professional.

Read Also: The secret weapon of a savvy business: Try these tips on how Facebook Ads will Crack the Conversion Code.

Instagram:

Instagram is a treat to our eyes. Especially for the younger generation, Instagram has become “The aesthetic” a highly visual app. The aesthetic experience of the product they want to consume becomes pivotal and not exactly camera-friendly pictures that one has in mind.

Keeping in mind the younger generations’ preferences, businesses can involve influencers and promote their product. As these younger peeps are the ones who go by the experience and not product reviews, reels become an absolutely necessary tool in this app.

Reels are 30 second or less content always shown in vertical alignment. Those dynamic random contents is what will make your target audience catch up with your product. But there's a catch. With reels, marketers only have about 30 seconds to showcase their product, so to grab the audience's attention, it becomes a necessity to add stunning visuals.

With the addition of shopping features and influencer partnerships, Instagram has blurred the line between interaction and shopping, thus making it eminently used for personal narrative and marketing strengthening.

X (formerly Twitter):

X (formerly twitter) is the microblogging site where truly every word counts.

It's turned out to be the go-to space for real-time updates, be it breaking news, political discourse, or even the latest celebrity drama.

The character limit that X instills upon its users automatically makes them concise, which has led the platform to be filled with trending topics and hashtag-driven conversations. Again, people with short attention spans can be targeted with real-time updates about your product or service.

Public figures, from politicians to celebrities, have used X as a megaphone for their voice and hence it can be a strong tool of influence and communication.

This makes the platform essential in remaining informed and part of the global conversation that happens at any point in time. Through adding the right hashtags, marketers can grab more audience.

LinkedIn:

LinkedIn is used by all generations alike. LinkedIn is often called a professional Facebook, but it is so much more than that. It is the site to create connections, job search and develop a professional profile.

This can be a more professional and concise way for social media marketing. Whether looking for a new job or scouting out potential companies to round out one's career, LinkedIn helps find the right path. Therefore, marketers can use this app for showcasing their professional content, whether articles or job listings, making LinkedIn different from other similar social media platforms.

For example, Zomato, a leading food delivery app, uses linkedin for more professional content. Below is the about section of Zomato on LinkedIn.
With their professionalism, more people will be attracted and use their service.

Company pages, together with endorsements of skills, make LinkedIn a great professional community that is genuine in helping advance careers and industries.

Snapchat:

Snapchat is differentiated from others as it currently has an element of buildup of its trademark feature about disappearing messages and stories, informing the person when someone takes the screenshot of their chats.

This becomes a popular app for Gen-Z people who primarily use this application, as it provides privacy and safety. Quick and casual interactions hold priority on this app.

Snapchat innovatively uses almost all the capabilities offered by augmented reality through its lenses and filters into every piece of content created on the platform.

Marketers can use this app via influencer marketing, and promote their products through these innovative features. Creating an Snapchat Ads account helps your business get discovered. Then, based on where you stand in a marketing funnel, choose an ad objective, such as awareness, lead generation, and app installs.

This makes Snapchat a very personal and exploratory platform. Being private, spontaneous, and very popular with Gen Z is what makes Snapchat a new trendsetter in the field of social media.

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