What is it?

Social media marketing is a form of digital marketing that leverages the power of popular social media networks to achieve your marketing and branding goals.

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Why?

⦁ It’s huge. Largest area to market in
⦁ It ubiquitous. Everyone is on it
⦁ It’s free though there are paid services as well
⦁ You can be “discovered” by new customers. On search engines customers have to look for you. Other mediums you target existing customers since you need their information to spread your campaign
⦁ There are built in advertising opportunities
⦁ They actively suggest things your customers may like, maybe you
⦁ You can target your demographic

It’s a Party

Social media marketing is like partying, you come enjoy the entertainment and leave. You want to throw great parties.
⦁ invitation = promotion
⦁ Food and Entertainment = Content
⦁ Hosting = Ongoing management (interacting with guests, maintainence, etc.)

Social Media is an illusion. They make it look fun and easy but in fact there is a lot of work put into it. You want your “guests” to enjoy themselves.

Two Goals

• Build brand equity (give target audience a positive feeling about the brand)
• Get a sale (doesn’t have to be direct. Could be just a lead [names, companies, email, number, etc.)

Two Posts (based on above):

• Buy our stuff (literally post advertisements of product and sales information)
• Fun (just trying to create positive barnd equity)

Discovery is key to success:

• Search. The potential customer litereally uses a search engine such as Google to look up information using Keywords. SEO is an important topic on this front.
• Review/Recommend/Trust. The user will visit sites to look up reviews of your brand. The user will take into account the number of stars, sales, followers, general activity as trust indicators that you are reprable company. The user may also be recommended your product by a friend or written review.
• Electronic Word of Mouth/Share/Influencers. Customers will “share” their experience and create positive buzz about your brand. Could go viral. Influencer marketing is having someone prominent recommend your product. They are a super trustful source. This is pretty closely related to review path. The difference is that the customer or influencer proactively pushes the product while in review it is more passive.
• Interrupt. This is the least favorable. Basically forced advertising. You go to them. This involves spam, youtube commercials, message compaigns, etc.Browse. Similar but not as obtrusive. This is when you see ads alongside your content. Sometimes it is suggested content. Your content is adjacent to what the customer is looking at,.

Structure of Social Media:

⦁ Users and brands produce content
⦁ Users are connected to other users and brands. They follow/like other brands/users
⦁ Users see and consume content when connections post it.
⦁ Platforms reward engagement. The more likes, shares, comments, views, etc. the better

Tic Toc is engagement first. Although liking users does increase chances it is more heavily based on engagement. It keeps track of how long you are viewing the content. It will then push alike content. This is different than other social platforms that are more connections based. It pushes strangers more and friends less. It is a recommendation engine. Others are following suit.
Because of this you must:
⦁ Grow your follows, likes, comments, shares, etc. You still need these connections and engagements first and foremost
⦁ Think about strangers. Imagine someone who doesn’t know your brand at all. Is your content going to make them a believer.
⦁ Grab attention. I know clickbait is frowned upon but you have to create over the top headlines to draw attention
⦁ Foster engagement. You have to do more than likes, shares, etc. They must watch the content. Partly viewed content can actually hurt you.
It is both social and recommendation based

Customer Conitinuum

Customer continuum

A prospect becomes a customer, a customer becomes a fan, and a fan become an evangelist. You want your customers to love your product so much that they are proactive about making positive reviews and recommendations.

Customer from hell

You may have customers that hates the brand so much they actively post negative comments. Reputation management is the industry term for being aware of both positive and negative social medai discussions about your brand.

Be sure to turn one touch to many. You want to create a positive experience that leads the customer to be addicted to your social media account and actively thinking about it.
You want to create a positive feedback loop. Positive begets positive.

Content

Socail Media Marketing is realling content marketing. You are constently producing content for your audience to consume. The difficult thing is producing enough content.
Share your knowledge and your passion. Become a “helpful expert” to your customers. You should do what you know.
Content formats:
⦁ Photos. This is bread and butter
⦁ Memes. People love memes and they can go viral
⦁ Infographic/Instructographics. Tell a story with facts and helpful content
⦁ Blog Posts. Oldest form but useful. If you are a good writer this is a great format. Try to be entertaining and informative
⦁ Short Text (post/tweet/etc). May be funny, inspirational, quote, cute, informative, commentary, etc. Keep it short and sweet.
⦁ Slideshows. Mixture of text and imagery similar to powerpoint
⦁ Videos. Video as become a larger and larger part of the pie.

Think about creating content on a schedule:
⦁ During events. Maybe you create content everytime there is a party, holidays, etc.
⦁ Incentives. Give users a reason to post, share, comment, etc. on your social media.
⦁ Contests/Challenges. This is a great way to add content that you don’t have to create and improves engagement
⦁ Reminders. Every now and then re-engage users by send emails, messages, posts, etc.
⦁ Promotions. Pay for advertisments if necessary to get the ball rolling.

How to find content:
⦁ Bookmark Industry Blogs. Search for your keyword and simply add blog to it.
⦁ Google search. Enter your keywords and in the tools section choose last month to get recent content
⦁ Google news. Google will give you alerts when there is new news that relates to topics you have searched before.
⦁ Drumup is a software that integrates with social media platforms and helps you curate content.
⦁ Feedly is a newsreader integrated with googleor facebook login. It allows you to follow important blogs
⦁ Easely. Templates and design objects to create infographics. A competitor is piktochart
⦁ Buzzsumo is a buzz monitoring software. Let’s you kinow what is trending basic on your criteria
⦁ Google alerts allows you to input keywords and recieve daily or weekly alerts using the google search engine.
⦁ start.me is a dashboard that allows you to keep most of the above in a tidy package.
Encourage UGC (user generated content):
⦁ ask for feedback. Instead of posting a photo ask for their photos
⦁ Competition. This is a fun way to get users engaged
⦁ Challenges. This is a mainstay of Tic toc
⦁ Use hashtags. This is a good way to catolog user content using your own labels

Besides creating content you can “curate” others. This is useful for filling out your posts. You can simply just comment and direct people to others’ content.
⦁ Identify your content themes that you don’t want to create content on yourself but know your demographic would enjoy
⦁ Research and identify content. Browse blogs, portals, websites, social media feeds, etc. Separate wheat from chaff.
⦁ Summarize the content and post in on outlets like Twitter with short URL links,.

Website Homepage:

Building on the lab from last week we will complete the homepage by entering the content.. The final content (text, images, embedded content, etc.) will be formatted to fit in the sections they are applied. CSS will be applied to control the color, text, and boxes of the site.