What is SMM?

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is marketing that targets social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok for brand promotion, target audience growth, driving website traffic, and increasing sales. Below you can see the number of monthly users of the most popular social platforms.

Social networks	Active users, monthly
Facebook	2.37 billion
Instagram	over 1 billion
TikTok	800 million
Twitter	326 million
LinkedIn	303 million
Pinterest	300 million

• Benefits of social media marketing:
• ✔ Increase brand awareness
• ✔ Boost website traffic
• ✔ Faster and easier content distribution
• ✔ Regular interaction with the target audience
• ✔ Industry, marketplace and competitor insights

Social Media Marketing Goals

You can pursue a huge variety of goals with social media marketing — it depends on your overall marketing strategy. Here are some examples of popular goals for SMM:

• community engagement increase;
• sales and lead generation;
• customer retention;
• website traffic growth;
• audience growth;
• handling negative feedback;
• feedback search;
• competitors and trends monitoring;
• increasing brand awareness;
• consumer demand research.

No matter what your goals are, you have to define them precisely — it will help create your SMM strategy and content.

How Social Media Marketing (SMM) Works

Social media has changed the way we function as a society, including the way we connect with one another. As platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram took off, businesses also took notice. They began to use these sites to further their interests through social media marketing. That’s because these sites are able to change consumer behavior.

Social media websites allow marketers to employ a broad range of tactics and strategies to promote content and have people engage with it. Many social networks allow users to provide detailed geographical, demographic, and personal information, which enables marketers to tailor their messages to what is most likely to resonate with users.

According to Buffer, there are five key pillars of social media marketing:

• Strategy: This step involves determining goals, the social media channels to be used, and the type of content that will be shared.
• Planning and Publishing: Businesses should draft plans of what their content will look like (i.e. will there be videos? Photos? How much script?) and decide when it will be put out on the platform.
• Listening and Engagement: Monitoring what users, customers, and others are saying about the posts, brands, and any other business assets. This may require the adoption of a social media engagement tool.
• Analytics and Reporting: Part of being on social media is knowing how far posts are going, so reports of engagement and reach are very important
• Advertising: Purchasing ads on social media is a great way to promote and further develop a brand. 

Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social media marketing campaigns have the advantage of appealing to a broad audience at once. For example, a campaign may appeal to current and prospective customers, employees, bloggers, the media, the general public, and other stakeholders, such as third-party reviewers or trade groups.

But these campaigns can also create obstacles that companies may not have had to deal with otherwise. For example, a viral video claiming that a company’s product causes consumers to become ill must be addressed by the company, regardless of whether the claim is true or false. Even if a company can set the message straight, consumers may be less likely to purchase from the company in the future.

• Tips for beginners:
•  
• ✔ Create a content plan for every platform
• ✔ Post regularly and frequently
• ✔ Include hashtags to increase brand awareness
• ✔ Use visuals to boost engagement
• ✔ Explore different content formats
• ✔ Interact with your audience
• ✔ Entertain your subscribers