What is Social Media Marketing (SMM), how it works and its 4 advantages and disadvantages

What Is Social Media Marketing (SMM)?

Social media marketing, often called digital marketing or e-marketing, is the process of using social media platforms—where people create social networks and share information—to increase a business’ online visibility, boost sales, and improve website traffic. SMM includes built-in data analytics capabilities that allow marketers to monitor the effectiveness of their campaigns and find new opportunities for investment while giving businesses the means to interact with their existing customers and attract new ones.

Between 2004 (when MySpace became the first social media site to reach one million subscribers) and 2022, the rapid expansion of interactive digital channels in the 18 years has pushed social media beyond the reach of radio and television.
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By the beginning of 2023, it was 4.76 billion social media users globally—over 59% of the world’s population.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Social media and social networks, such as Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and Instagram, are used in social media marketing to promote goods and services, communicate with existing clients, and attract new ones.
• The source of social media marketing’s strength is social media’s unparalleled potential in the three key marketing domains of connection, engagement, and customer data.
• Social media marketing has revolutionized how companies can influence consumer behavior, from content that encourages interaction to collecting personal information that helps consumers relate to messages.
• The ubiquity of social media in today’s world makes social media marketing strategies crucial for companies.
• Social media marketing is frequently more affordable and has higher visibility; However, it requires constant monitoring and may cause unexpected adverse reactions.

Why Is Social Media Marketing (SMM) So Powerful?

Social media’s unparalleled potential across three key marketing domains connections, engagement, and customer data—is what powers social media marketing.

Connection

Social media not only gives businesses access to previously unattainable levels of client interaction, it also offers an incredible array of channels to reach specific audiences, from microblogging services like X to social sites like Facebook and content platforms like YouTube.

Interaction

Social media interactions are dynamic, allowing businesses to take advantage of free advertising opportunities through eWOM (electronic word-of-mouth) recommendations from current and future clients. This can be through direct conversation or passive like. The fact that these interactions take place on social networks makes them observable, moreover, a valuable driver of consumer decisions due to the positive contagion effect of eWOM. Businesses, for example, can calculate their social equity, which is another term for return on investment (ROI)  from their social media marketing initiatives.

Customer Data

Customer data is another important tool that provides a well-designed social media marketing plan to increase marketing results. Don’t let the 3Vs of  big data volume, variety, and velocity—overwhelm you. SMM technologies are able to collect customer data and transform it into useful market analysis. You can use the data to crowdsource new tactics.

Important

Consider the possibility that access to social media may vary by group. Certain categories of individuals without Internet access may be inadvertently excluded if marketing efforts are limited to digital or online platforms.

How Social Media Marketing (SMM) Works

Social media revolutionized how people interact and how companies can influence consumer behavior as platforms like Facebook, X and Instagram gained popularity. These platforms allow businesses to promote content that promotes engagement and extract personal, demographic and geographic data that helps messages resonate with consumers.

SMM Action Plan

Your SMM approach will work better if it is more focused. Leading social media management software vendor Hootsuite suggests the following steps for creating an SMM campaign with performance indicators and an execution framework:

• Align SMM goals with specific business goals.
• Find out about the age, geography, income of your target market.
  Business, industry and hobby.
• Analyze the performance and shortcomings of your competitors in a competitive manner.
• Check your current SMM (Availability and Shortcomings).
  Schedule distribution of SMM materials.
• Generate great content Monitor results and make necessary adjustments to your SMM approach

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Social media marketing (SMM) offers many distinct advantages over traditional marketing. One such advantage is that SMM allows for both customer-to-customer and firm-to-customer engagement, which facilitates targeted customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. Put another way, SMM can measure customer value through direct-purchasing and indirectly through product recommendations. Traditional marketing, on the other hand, primarily measures customer value by recording purchasing activity.

Shareable Content

Companies can also use the enhanced connectivity of SMM to create sticky content – a marketing term for visually appealing content that instantly attracts customers. They buy items and spread the word about the resulting content. Creating shareable content is one of the most important ways to drive growth in social media marketing because it not only reaches an audience that might not otherwise be reached, but also implicitly endorses someone the recipient knows and trusts.

Earned Media

Customer-generated product evaluations and recommendations are another type of earned media (a term used to describe brand exposure from any source other than paid advertising) and SMM is one of the most effective ways to benefit from them.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is another social media marketing method that relies on an audience to create a message. Viral marketing is a marketing tactic that aims to accelerate the distribution of word of mouth product information. A marketing message is considered viral when it spreads to an audience beyond its initial target population. This is a very simple and affordable technique to increase sales.

Customer Segmentation

As social media marketing (SMM) offers much more sophisticated customer segmentation than traditional marketing channels, businesses can ensure that they direct their marketing efforts to their precise target groups.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media Marketing (SMM)

The Bottom Line

Social media marketing (SMM) engages customers using social media platforms to grow a business, increase revenue, and improve website traffic. The ability to drive revenue from specific user demographics is a competitive evolving market for views and clicks as social media usage continues to grow worldwide on both computer and mobile devices.

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