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Social media marketing (SMM) is a form of internet marketing that uses your everyday social media apps as a marketing tool. These social media platforms will enable your brand to connect with the audience to:

Social media marketing

When developing marketing programs, one key area that marketers care about is how to deliver their messaging. Social media helps spread those messages to the right people at the right time, through both free and paid means. Social media also enables brands to learn more about their audience's personal, geographic, and demographic information. This enables organizations to customize their messaging and content for the best engagement.

1. Social strategy

With any marketing campaign or activity, an appropriate strategy should be laid out in advance. You need to determine the goals of the program, the channels that will be used and what types of content will be shared. Here are some examples:

Determine goals

Using social media for marketing should align closely with your business and other marketing program goals. Some goals that businesses can use to measure success include increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic and leads, and increasing revenue.

Select social media platforms

There are many social platforms available, but it doesn't make sense for your business to use them all. You need to know your audience and choose the platform(s) that best fit their demographic.

Content mix.

Each social platform has a unique flavor for distributing content -- including video, imagery, links and direct messaging. So brands need to identify which content their marketing persona is most likely to engage with.

2. Planning and publishing

After establishing a strategy, it is time to begin publishing. This can be as simple as posting a new blog post, sharing information about an upcoming event or posting a new product video. But being consistent is the key to an effective SMM program. To build an audience, you should post frequently to the page. Posting relevant content consistently will keep the audience coming back for more.

Content that you post to social media should align with other marketing promotions. Tools such as Hootsuite, HubSpot and Sprout Social enable marketers to schedule their posts at the appropriate time.

Analytics and reporting

As more content is published and the audience expands, it is a good idea to continuously measure performance. Questions to ask include the following:

Where are a brand's followers from?
Which posts are getting the most engagement?

The success of any marketing program is dependent on its data and analytics outputs. A marketing team can use this information to make more informed decisions on future campaigns and take advantage of what works.

Each social platform has its own analytics data, but there are other tools that can collect data from many channels into one location. This enables marketers to evaluate the overall success and failures of their marketing campaigns.

Social Media Marketing