Why is social media so important for business?
Social media marketing is the easiest way to reach a large audience. Currently, half of the world's population, 3.8 billion people, use social media. Moreover, this number is constantly growing — since 2019, the number of users has grown by 9.2%.

Social platforms are essential for increasing brand awareness. According to Hootsuite, 52% of online businesses are found by users on social media. This is where most people learn about new brands. Therefore, social platforms offer great opportunities to attract the target audience and build long-term relationships.

According to Oberlo, 54% of users search for products on social media before buying. This means that the buyer's journey is increasingly starting with Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms. In this regard, the influence of social networks on sales is growing every year.

In addition to access to a multi-million audience and close interaction with customers, SMM has a number of other advantages. Here are the main ones.

Increase brand awareness
According to statistics, 71% of customers who have had a positive experience with a brand on a social network recommend the company to their family and friends. Therefore, in order to reach as many potential buyers as possible, it is important to create accounts on different social platforms. Use those communication channels where your target audience is.

Traffic growth
While many social media platforms allow brands to sell their products without clicking through to a website or landing page, they are still considered a great way to increase traffic. For example, 11% of all mobile website traffic is generated by social platforms.

Fast and easy content promotion
If you're using content marketing to promote your business, social media can help you reach your target audience. People always share useful and interesting information with their friends on social media. Often, users are not limited to one platform, which contributes to the growth of your target audience.

Social media marketing is a great way to inform customers about special offers. Social networks help to quickly and cheaply inform the target audience about promotions and giveaways, although most users prefer to receive advertising messages by email. To meet their preferences, use SendPulse to create email campaigns. With the help of the service, you can also combine email and SMM.

Regular interaction with the target audience
With half of the world's population using social media for almost three hours a day, SMM is the best way to engage with your audience. After all, the brand is already where your customers spend their time.

Moreover, social media marketing is an effective marketing channel for getting feedback. You can analyze reviews, likes, shares, comments, and other metrics. If your customers have had a bad shopping experience, they're more likely to let you know via social media than email or phone. This allows you to react in time and retain a particular client, as well as attract others.

Industry, market and competitor research
Social media gives you the ability to track customer satisfaction, trends, and the activities of your competitors. Analysis of the latest industry news provides ideas for additional content. For example, you can get a new topic to discuss with your followers.

Social Media Marketing Goals

increasing the level of involvement;
Sales and lead generation;
Customer retention;
increase in traffic on the site;
expanding the target audience;
collecting feedback;
management of negative reviews;
tracking trends and competitors;
increasing brand awareness;
research of consumer demand.

Social Media Marketing Tools
Ten years ago, social media was a small area of marketing, so it was easily managed manually. Today, brand promotion through social platforms is a complex process that requires the use of many additional tools with which marketers solve various problems:

monitor brand mentions on social networks;
create and schedule posts;
build communication with users;
analyze the results.

KPIs, or key performance indicators, play an important role in marketing, sales, and social media marketing. These metrics help you measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.

Social media analytics have gone far beyond counting the number of likes, shares, comments, and subscriptions. Statistics provide many different indicators and allow you to analyze how exactly the SMM strategy affects the sales and promotion of the company.

For example, the Insights tab on your Facebook page has a list of sections that can help you track likes, reach, page views, user activity, and more.

KPIs, depending on the goals they help measure, can be divided into three groups: engagement, reach, and conversions. Let's take a closer look at the main metrics for analyzing the effectiveness of a company's promotion on social networks.

Engagement Rates
Engagement metrics help you measure the number of users who interact with your company's posts. Based on likes, shares, and comments, you can find out other metrics to get a more detailed picture:

Average engagement rate shows the ratio of the number of user reactions to the number of subscribers. You can calculate this metric for a single post or for all posts over a specific period.
The spread rate or Amplification rate shows how often users repost.
The virality level helps you understand what content goes viral.

Coverage indicators
If you've already seen the social media statistics report, you've probably seen coverage in it. This metric shows the number of unique users who viewed a business post. You can measure reach both among the page's followers and among other users of the social network. There are several types of coverage:

Organic is reach without promotion and advertising fees.
paid — coverage received when connecting ads;
Viral reach is unique impressions that are received thanks to reposts.
Now, let's take a look at what reach metrics you can use as KPIs:

Post outreach: Shows the percentage of people who saw the post. This metric helps you find out how many followers and new users your posts see.
Audience growth rate — helps you track the growth rate of your page based on subscriber growth.
Social share of voice (SSoV) shows the percentage of mentions of your brand in relation to mentions of competitors. The indicator is calculated based on data for a certain period of time.

Conversion Rates
Your content may have good organic reach and engagement, but how will it benefit your business? To find out, analyze such indicators as:

Conversion rate is a metric that shows how many people converted into customers through your post.
CTR (Click-through rate) is an indicator that displays the number of users who responded to your CTA.

How to create an SMM strategy?
Effective social media marketing is impossible without a well-thought-out SMM strategy. Below we have prepared the main points of its development:

Determine the goals of promotion in social networks. Make SMM a part of your company's overall marketing strategy. Combine social media with email and other communication channels.
Analyze your target audience. Develop a buyer persona, study the pains and desires of customers. This will help you create relevant content and offers.
Select key social networks. Not all social platforms may be right for your business. Use the ones that are popular with your target audience.
Determine the brand language. How you interact with customers determines how they will perceive your brand.
Develop a content plan for SMM. Create several types of content, namely promotional, entertaining, and informative. Balance different types of posts according to your audience's interests.
Set KPIs to measure success. Remember, they should be measurable and strictly aligned with your social media marketing goals.

Chatbots are successfully used in various business areas. They are created by sanatoriums, restaurants, travel agencies, hotels, and educational companies. Depending on the goals, virtual assistants can advise customers, take orders, talk about the brand and products, inform about promotions and updates. Chatbots allow you to unload the support service, which helps companies save up to 30% of money on customer service.

Create a content plan for each platform
To use it effectively, prepare a content plan for at least a month in advance. Think about different approaches for each social network. Your content plans may differ in the frequency of publications and the format of posts, the main thing is that they should keep the audience engaged and engage.

To optimize account management, use special auto-posting services. They will help you schedule posts and publish them without your participation, and will also allow you to track the performance of all social networks in one place.

Post regularly and frequently
The basic rule of successful social media marketing is to post regularly. This allows you to maintain audience engagement and organic reach. Frequency also matters. Brands that post new content once or twice a day attract twice as many users as brands that post multiple times a week.

To maintain a high frequency of posts, try using existing content. For example, transform blog posts or landing pages into infographics or create useful checklists based on them.

Use hashtags to increase brand awareness
When used correctly, hashtags help your content appear in search results, increase brand awareness, and allow you to build a community. Keep an eye on popular hashtags in your industry and make sure they haven't been used before. Analyze how hashtags work for your audience.

Along with using existing hashtags, try creating your own.

Use visuals to increase engagement
Using pictures and videos on social media is a must. Approximately 80% of marketers are already using them. Users love this type of content and are more willing to share it with others. For example, tweets with images or other visual elements are 1.5 times more likely to retweet than posts without them.

One of the most engaging types of visual content is video. You can create videos without a budget and the involvement of a team of professionals. Try shooting animated videos using free services, record your workday on your smartphone, or use content created by other users.

Experiment with different content formats
Each social network offers different content formats. For example, on Facebook, you can post long posts, medium and short text notes, stories, and 360 videos. Instagram allows you to post stories, photos, and short and long videos on IGTV.

About 62% of companies noted that Instagram stories motivate subscribers to write in direct. Meanwhile, only 12.2% of brands use IGTV. Try out the different features and content formats that social media offers you, track results, and use the ones that work well for your company. For example, National Geographic uses 360 video.

Engage with your audience
Audience engagement is the primary focus of social media marketing. Monitor comments and discussions regularly, always answer questions from your followers, and never delete negative feedback and reviews. If your customer is unhappy with a purchase – do your best to change the experience and improve their current and future experience. Your goal is not only to apologize, but also to help the customer solve the problem, as the Citrus online store does.

Entertain your followers
Finding funny and interesting content is the main reason why people use social media. Publishing posts with humor can increase your audience's engagement. However, be careful, jokes should be funny, but at the same time polite, relevant and accurately dosed. It is desirable that entertaining posts make up about 20% of publications.

Try different content formats, such as jokes, games, polls, quizzes, puzzles, or challenges.