What is Social Media Marketing?

• 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).
• 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.
• There are a range of social media management tools that help businesses to get the most out of the social media platforms listed above.
• Buffer is a platform of social media management tools, which can help you achieve success with your social media marketing.
• Businesses were sharing their content on social media to generate traffic to their websites and, hopefully, sales.
• 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 marketing for small businesses usually starts with having a consistent presence on social media.
• Publishing to social media is as simple as sharing a blog post, an image, or a video on a social media platform.
• To ensure that you are maximizing your reach on social media, you need to publish great content that your audience likes, at the right timing and frequency.
• There are a variety of social media scheduling tools, such as Buffer Publish, that can help you publish your content automatically at your preferred time.
• This saves you time and allows you to reach your audience when they are most likely to engage with your content.
• You can instead use a social media listening and engagement tool that aggregates all your social media mentions and messages, including posts that didn’t tag your business’s social media profile.
• Whether you are publishing content or engaging on social media, you will want to know how your social media marketing is performing.
• To get more in-depth analytics information or to compare across social media platforms, you can use the wide range of social media analytics tools available, such as Buffer Analyze.
• The authors use Facebook ads, Pinterest ads, and other social media ads to increase the brand awareness and engagement on the respective social media platforms.
• Buffer's social media marketing blog covers the latest social media strategies and tools for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more.
• The complete beginner's guide to creating a social media marketing plan, for those brand new to social media and looking for a straightforward way to start.

Important Highlights

• Nowadays, businesses use social media in a myriad of different ways
• 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
• Buffer is a platform of social media management tools, which can help you achieve success with your social media marketing
• A business that is concerned about what people are saying about its brand would monitor social media conversations and response to relevant mentions
• A business that wants to reach a specific set of audience at scale would run highly-targeted social media ads
• Social media marketing for small businesses usually starts with having a consistent presence on social media