What is Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Marketing can be broken down into two categories. The first is Content Marketing, and the second is Advertising.
Content Marketing
Social media content marketing is creating and publishing content: written, spoken/audio, picture, or video. All social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok allow you to post content to your account for free. You have to invest the time creating the content and publishing it.
The secondary challenge with Social Media is the size of your audience, often described as followers/subscribers. Growing your audience is key to creating a voice on social media as a content marketer. Unfortunately, your audience is zero when you start, so you have to rely on friends and family to get you started and work growing out from there. The bigger your audience, the more influence your content will have.
Entertaining content is the best way to attract and maintain an audience. But, unfortunately, the opposite is also accurate boring is simply boring. Therefore, to be successful in Social Media Content Marketing, you will need to regularly publish good, entertaining content to keep your audience engaged and happy.
People will give you their time when you offer them entertainment.
People will give you their money when you offer them hope.
– Roy H. Williams
Social Media Advertising
Social Media Advertising is when you pay the social media platform to show your advertisement to as many people as you can afford each day. All social media platforms have an advertising system built into them because that is how they make their money. The users, content creators publish content on the platform to share with their audiences of friends, family, etc. The social media platform will then charge you for the advertisement they put into their feed.
Social Media Advertising is not much different than advertising in a magazine, newspaper, or Yellowpages. An advertisement is made up of one or more headlines, a description, a URL (link) to the webpage you want the person to go to, a picture or video, and a button typically. Each platform is slightly different in its advertising format; however, your headline, visual content, and description will need to catch people’s attention as they casually scroll through social media.
Advertising is a paid audience for your message/content. Followers or subscribers are your loyal audience of fans. So yes, you can use Advertising to grow your audience of subscribers or followers.
Good luck with your social media marketing.
