What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is a way for companies or brands to interact with customers, maybe potential customers in a social, natural way. This is typically done on bigger sites like Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter but it can also be done on smaller niche sites that are built more around the community. Social media is like a town-hall, it’s a place where people to come to see their families or to catch up with friends, share stories even discuss today’s latest breaking news or educate themselves. People don’t want to be handed a flyer with your sales pitch on it, people want to discuss and engaging things that are relevant to them, interesting to them, as a chance for brands to get in touch with these prospects that could be coming through their pipeline, as a chance for them to reach out to people that may not know anything about them, to be able to discuss what’s important to them, to engage in these conversations and have real discussions about real things that matter to the individual.

Social media marketing can serve every stage of the buying cycle.

To me, there’s really two that stand out the most. The first one is the awareness stage which is where customers or prospects may not know anything about your company and you’re really just trying to get yourself in front of them and so you’re trying to engage in conversations with them or trying to just find places where they’re talking about things that are related to your company, so you reach out to them and just make them aware of you, of your company.

The second one is kind of on the other end of the spectrum which is more the customer relations side of things. Whether that support or just turning your existing customers, your most loyal ones, into brand advocates.

If there’s one thing to remember with social media marketing is to be yourself and have a personality. People don’t want to engage with something stiff or just a logo they want to engage with a human so be a human being, be natural and be social.