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Things are no longer the way they used to be. Social Media is no longer for leisure, posting a few times on Facebook or Instagram. To grow your brand and make sales, you need to be deliberate in engaging your clients and prospects.

You will need a brilliant plan to start being abreast with the constant trends in the digital world so you don’t miss out. Below is a guide to certain terms and keywords you will come across.

Social Media Marketing Terms and Definitions

Content

Content is whatever you put out on social media. From a Facebook story to an Instagram reel. Contents vary in form and you need to merge them accordingly to the right platforms.

Context

Context is putting the right content in the right place for proper online visibility. Like Gary Vaynerchuk said, “Content is King but context is god”. You cannot put an amazing comedy video content amidst a wordy blog post. But if you put it out there on Tik Tok, it will hit the screen big! It now become very accessible to anyone as the most-watched video on Tik Tok.

Hashtags

People are very familiar with hashtags but most people don’t know how to use them correctly. They help to add meta information on almost all social media platforms. They explain and mark the keywords of your content and mark it as part of current trends.

Shares

Whenpeople love your content and share it, it’s a glass ceiling breaker. A great way to measure and monitor your content analytics is by using Buzzsumo; a great social media tool. The more shares, the more people find and engage in your content. Shares are the best engagements.

Engagements

This is a term relating to how people connect with your content. It can differ from a like to a reaction, a comment or an amazing share. Shares are the highest form of engagement.

Let’s now have a look at some of the core social media principles, now that we have a grasp of some common terms in social media marketing.

The Five (5) Core Social Media Principles

With the rate at which the globe is going digital, you just need to put your business out there. Approximately 4.48 billion people own accounts on social media, therefore is a whole world of potential clients that any business at all can reach. Creating great quality content goes a long way to reaching them.

Let’s dissect these five (5) principles, shall we?

Strategy

A well-planned social media marketing strategy is the genesis of your presence on social media. Without a proper strategy, you’d be wasting your time online and would be unlikely to achieve your goals and would struggle to reach your audience.

A content strategy is simply putting the “right content” out there to the “right people”, at the “right time”. A content strategy helps you reach your brand and company goals by enabling you to:

• Create valuable content
• Drive traffic
• Increase your conversion rates

Finally, you need to set benchmarks to monitor your progress online and see if another approach would be better.

Planning and Posting

Social media is a great advertising tool, but rushing off to post content without a proper plan behind it is dangerous to your brand and business. Keep these three (3) tips in mind when planning out your content.

• Know your audience, is very important.
• Focus on the quality of your content
• Remember your brand values and keep to them.

There’s one golden rule to putting your content out there: Consistency. Consistency is key. Being consistent with your posting/publishing schedule keeps your audience glued to your content and brand.

 Listening and Engagement

Listen to your audience and find out their pain points, their likes and dislikes. Engage with them to know how they feel about your brand. Your feedback might not always be great, but if you don’t deal with their pain points, their responses will remain the same.

Listening to your audience does not only include customer experience, but it also helps you find out some certain things that would boost your brand like:

• Pick up on trends.
• Identify new streams of income.
• Know industry insights.
• Find influencers in your niche.

Analytics

For you to succeed in social media marketing, you need to be cognizant of tracking your data through analytics. This feature helps you to understand user behaviour, re-strategize, know the platforms that your brand thrives best on, know the times that are best for you to publish your content and also monitor your competitors.

This way, you have a clue of what works for your brand and what doesn’t work. It helps to save time so you can focus your energy on what’s working and leave what’s not working behind. This would guide your future decisions and help your success rates.

  Advertising

With approximately 2.91 billion monthly active users on Facebook alone is room for an incredible number of potential customers. Social media is a great place to grow your audience starting from analytics.

There are three (3) main types of Advertising

• Organic
• Paid
• Earned

Organic

Organic advertising is content that naturally has engagements without you paying for them.

Paid

This type of content is being paid for or sponsored by a corporate body or brand to reach a wider audience. Hence, they pay certain social media platforms to get their brands seen and heard by a specific number of people.

Earned

This is similar to the organic form of advertisement. It is given freely by these social media platforms in the form of likes, comments or shares.

  Specific Ways You Can Advertise on Social Media

• Create content: these are in the form of videos, write-ups and even pictures.
• Promote content: this is paying for the content you created to reach a wider audience.
• Engage with people in your niche: get interactive with people and groups that relate to you. Get the attention of influencers to your brand.
• Grow a following: make people who love your brand interact more closely with you by creating and sharing valuable content that appeals to them.
• Give value: offer your audience free value materials relating to your brand like PDFs, podcasts, white papers, PowerPoint presentations, etc.

  Additionally, if you aim at building your brand visibility, you need to build credibility and double your conversion rates through advertising. Additionally, ensure you:

• Focus your content on the specific niche or demographic for your audience.
• Build a quality relationship with your customers and influencers.
• Ensure you’re accessible via social media, so your audience would reach out to you easily.

Different Types of Social Media Marketing

Aside from the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, social media marketing takes many different forms, such as:

• content marketing/content creating
• advertising/sponsorship
• influencer marketing
• social media management/community management
• paid media
• building your following
• contributing to forums
• reviews

If you’re pretty serious about growing your brand, don’t just rush into the big sites to focus there, although they’re a great place to start. Find creative means to generate leads and get more prospects.

While exploring your options, find out what content suits each platform for better brand visibility.

Tips to Grow and Engage your Audience on Social Media

Social media success begins with understanding your prospects and what they want from your brand.

From there, you can create content that resonates with them based on their shared interests.

With such an approach, you can build a loyal fan base that spreads the word about your brand organically.

You can achieve this by:

• creating a social media strategy with a concrete goal in mind knowing why you are posting on social media and what you want to achieve by doing so.
• choosing the right social media channels for your company or industry.
• experimenting with different content types such as live video or GIFs.
• keeping track of current trends in your industry and adapting your marketing strategy accordingly, but don’t copy what other companies are doing; great advertising campaigns integrate something new!
• holding contests and inviting user-generated content.
• sharing valuable content.
• starting conversations and writing actionable content to inspire people to click through, read more, or even download your free brochure or mobile app.
• connecting with influencers mostly in the form of celebrities (local/international).
• following your competitors and learning from them.
• using hashtags.

Finally, remember not to ignore the basics.

Above all: share great, original content, and get to know your followers’ wants and needs.

Provide them with the products/services that address their everyday problems, and you’ll soon see your social media marketing efforts take off.