Social Media Marketing Girl

Australian Marketing Agency

Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with your audience to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. This involves publishing great content on your social media profiles, listening to and engaging your followers, analyzing your results, and running social media advertisements.

The major social media platforms (at the moment) are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat. They are also called digital marketing platforms.

There are also a range of social media management tools that help businesses to get the most out of the social media platforms listed above. For example, Buffer is a platform of social media management tools, which can help you achieve success with your social media marketing. Whether you want to build a brand or grow your business, we want to help you succeed.

What is Social Media Marketing?

So you think you know social media? Perhaps you finally set up a Facebook account for your business and are wondering why it’s taking forever to generate followers? Or perhaps you occasionally even share pictures of yourself at the beach, or post a photo of that $29 kale and smashed avocado breakfast on Instagram?

In our experience, few really understand the lasting impact and huge reach that marketing on social media platforms can have.

Social media marketing is, in its essence, the pursuit of gaining traffic and attention to your site, brand or range of products or services through the use of social media platforms.

That’s right - Social media marketing is an unbelievably powerful way for businesses of all kinds, shapes and sizes to shape their brand, sell products and engage with ever increasing consumer bases, and in this day and age, if you’re not utilising these platforms to further promote and engage with potential and existing customers, than ... putting it simply; you’re missing out.

Advantages of using social media

Social media marketing has many advantages:

broad reach — social media can reach millions of people all around the world
ability to target particular groups — many forms of social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) allow businesses to target specific groups, often in particular locations
free or low-cost — many forms of social media are free for business, and paid options are usually low-cost
personal — social media allow you to communicate on a personal basis with individual customers and groups
fast — you can quickly distribute information to many people
easy — you don't need high-level skills or computer equipment to participate in social media. The average person with a standard computer should have no difficulty.

Risks of using social media

Of course, marketing through social media also has its risks. These include:

wasted time and money for little or no tangible return
the rapid spread of the wrong kind of information about your business (e.g. incorrect information accidentally posted by you, negative reviews posted by others)
legal problems if you don't follow privacy legislation and the laws regarding spam, copyright and other online issues.

It's important to be aware of these risks and to have strategies in place to avoid them if you decide to get involved in social media marketing.

Social media marketing increases your brand's awareness. 78% of small businesses use social media to attract new customers. Furthermore 33% of customers have identified social media as how they identify new brands products and services. Social media marketing helps to validate your brand.

Social networking services can provide an accessible and powerful toolkit for highlighting and acting on issues and causes that affect and interest young people. Social networking services can be used for organising activities, events, or groups to showcase issues and opinions and make a wider audience aware of them.

What are the six basic steps of social marketing? The six steps of the process: analysis, strategy development, program and communication design, pretesting, implementation, and evaluation and feedback.

Updated for 2023