What is Social Media Marketing?

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.

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.

A Quick Overview of Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing first started with publishing. Businesses were sharing their content on social media to generate traffic to their websites and, hopefully, sales. But social media has matured far beyond being just a place to broadcast content.

Nowadays, businesses use social media in a myriad of different ways. 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). A business that wants to understand how it’s performing on social media would analyze its reach, engagement, and sales on social media with an analytics tool (social media analytics). A business that wants to reach a specific set of audience at scale would run highly-targeted social media ads (social media advertising). As a whole, these are often also known as social media management.

Facebook Marketing

Millions of businesses, big and small, connect with people on Facebook.

Make connections that matter.

2.7 billion people use Facebook every month1 to connect with friends and family and to discover things that matter. Find new customers and build lasting relationships with them.

Instragram Marketing

Instagram can also help you grow your brand awareness and introduce new products. Every month, 130 million Instagram users engage with shopping content. Instagram allows you to promote your brand and product in a friendly, authentic way without hard selling to your customers.
Instagram stories is a way to get more direct with your audience, and, thanks to updates such as being able to mention accounts, add stickers, and shoppable tags, it's also become a great way to promote products. Not only that, it allows brands to interact one-on-one with their audience.
If you want to reach potential customers on Instagram, the fastest way to do that is through influencers who have already built an audience with a large following. More and more people are buying services or products based on what they see in their feed from the influential people they follow. They trust them.

Youtube Marketing

YouTube Marketing is the practice of promoting businesses and products on YouTube's platform, by uploading valuable videos on a company's YouTube channel or using YouTube ads.
YouTube is a critical marketing tool for practically any company in any industry. ... For business, online video marketing presents a unique opportunity. Used efficiently, video marketing can help to build trust and establish an organization as having authority. Moreover, it makes it easier to connect and engage customers.