Social Media Marketing – The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide

Social Media Platforms are being widely used. The number of social media platforms has increased drastically and the number of social media users has increased too.

In India, after the availability of internet and smartphones at an affordable price, the usage of internet has increased to many folds.

Indians use social media heavily.

As per Statista, there are more than 350 million social media users in India.

As per The Hindu, an Indian user spends around 2.4 hours on an average on social media per day. Also, the internet & mobile phones have reached even the remotest corner of the nation. The stats are never-ending.

But over here, the moral of the story is the fact that brands take advantage of social media marketing very effectively in a country like India.

Therefore, if you are planning to enter the digital marketing field then social media marketing (SMM) is a very important skill that you must learn.

Also even if you are not planning to enter the digital marketing field then too, it is very important to learn the basics of social media marketing. Social media marketing can help you in your personal branding.

It can help you in scaling up your existing business or start your new business from scratch.

This is the ultimate guide to social media marketing and you will find a lot of resources (FREE resources) below. Just keep reading!

All you need to do is take a pen-paper or open a notepad and keep making notes of the important points.

Let us first understand what exactly is social media marketing.

What is Social Media Marketing?

The marketing which takes place with the help of various social media platforms is Social Media Marketing (SMM).

The various social media platforms are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, LinkedIn, etc.

In the above image, can you identify all the social media platforms by their logos? What all social media platforms are you currently using?

The number of platforms is endless. These are a few of the most popularly used social media platforms. One cannot excel on all the platforms. Hence, you need to identify the best platforms for you. How to do that? We will see it ahead in the strategy formation section.

SMM can be used to promote the brand, it’s products/services and websites on social media platforms.

Unique and engaging content is created and published on social media platforms to engage with the target audience. The content should be helpful.

Social Media Marketing helps in boosting conversions and creating brand awareness.

But, it is not just about posting content on various social media platforms. It requires a proper strategy.

Before we jump ahead, let me tell you how important social media marketing is.

Because unless you understand it’s importance, it won’t fascinate you. Unless it fascinates you, you will do it just for the sake of doing it. And when you do things just for formality, you don’t enjoy the process and your creativity suppresses.

Importance of Social Media Marketing

We all know that social media marketing is important. But how much?

It depends from person to person.

From a person who earns out of it to a person who uses it just to spend time, it is important for everyone. But the level of importance varies.

For a person who is just using it to spend time, might not even bother about the posts he/she is sharing on it, the consistency, content quality or timings of the posts. Because the goal of the person is to just spend time (leisure time) scrolling through various social media platforms.

On the contrary, a social media manager (or a digital marketer) will very sincerely focus on the quality of the content, the timings of making posts, the performance of the campaign and so on.

Who can describe the importance of social media marketing better than a social media marketer itself?

Hence I reached out to Anshika Srivastava who is a social media strategist and has been working in this industry for more than 10 years. Being a woman, she has been through various phases like marriage, the experience of becoming a mother and raising a kid and much more.

It is this journey of a woman which inspired her to be on a mission of helping women and brands grow digitally.

Social Media Marketing have played a key role in her career and this is what she said when I asked her about what is the importance of social media marketing –

“Social media has become an integral part of our daily lives. There are 3.5 billion social media users worldwide as of 2019, as per Emarsys, and this number is only growing. Another study by GlobalWebIndex reports that an average of 3 hours are spent per day per person on social networks and messaging.

With so much usage of social media, how can it be ignored?

Given that social media is so important in people’s lives, marketers and businesses are leveraging different social platforms in the hope of reaching their target audience to build their brand and increase sales.

This is what Social Media Marketing is, an important arsenal in your digital marketing toolkit. It helps businesses to reach their target audience locally, regionally, nationally and even internationally.

Social Media Marketing includes publishing great content for company social media pages, in order to engage the target audience, increase followers, generate leads and improve conversions.

Habits of people change, social media platforms evolve, and new platforms and technologies keep coming. If you want to be successful in social media marketing, then you should keep yourself updated with the changing trends, human mindset and some good copywriting skills. As then only you will be able to create personalized messages, which will resonate with the audience more appropriately and result in more conversions.

As a digital marketer and social media strategist, with experience of more than 10 years, I will suggest that – it is more important than ever before to understand and stay ahead of the curve when it comes to social media. Ensure that you have the right tools at your disposal, an up-to-date strategy, and the required skills to make the most as a social media marketer”

Absolutely correct, Anshika! Your words beautifully described the importance of social media and I figured out 3 important takeaways from them:

1. Being up-to-date with latest digital marketing trends is important for succeeding
2. One must update his/her skills regularly
3. But just having updated skills or knowledge of latest trends is not enough. One must have an up-to-date social media strategy too.

Social Media Strategy is important for social media marketing to be successful.

But how to devise a good strategy?

Let us understand the process of making an amazing social media marketing strategy.

Understanding the process of creating a social media marketing strategy

It is not important to religiously stick to this described process. But this is a generic process which works universally for everyone. One can improvise it as per one’s creativity.

The end goal is to get the most out of social media marketing.

This is a 5 step process (framework)

1. Goals (What are your goals?)
   
2. Audience (What is your target audience?)
   
3. Platform (Where is your target audience?)
   
4. Content (What will be the content?)
   
5. Implement & Analyze (How will you share the content and analyze the results?)

#1. Set Goals

The first is setting goals. You want to do social media marketing. Good. But WHY?

You must know what are your goals for your social media marketing.

For instance, if your business is new, the goal can be brand awareness. This is a qualitative metric.

We need a quantitative metric for it’s measurement. Here, the goal can be 10K Likes on Instagram Page.

The goals can be either qualitative or quantitative. But, while setting the goals, you must also finalize a few metrics using which you can measure the effectiveness of the entire social media marketing activities that you plan to conduct.

Different businesses/individuals will have different goals. Goals must be realistic.

Set proper goals before actually beginning social media marketing so that you know where you have to reach.

If the goal is big, decompose it into various stages and set small goals that take you toward your big goal.

#2. Know your target audience

The next step is to identify the target audience for your product/services. Usually what people do is they start promoting their products or services on social media without defining a target audience.

If you run ads which are visible to everyone then you might get impressions, but you won’t get conversions. The ultimate goal is SALES. Right?

So, before you begin your social media marketing activities, be very clear about your target audience.

Every social media platform have a different set of audience. You must know where your audience is and in order to know where is your audience, you must answer the question “Who is your audience?”

Research. Make personas of the people who are likely to use your products/services and have a clear understanding of your target audience.

HubSpot have an amazing “Make a Buyer Persona” tool. You can access it for FREE by using my affiliate link – http://hubs.to/NgpDz

(If you upgrade or purchase later, I will get a commission)

#3. Identify Social Media Platforms on the basis of your target audience

Once you have identified your audience, you need to identify the social media platforms where they spend most of their time.

If you are trying to promote a conference for management leaders, it is much obvious that you would emphasize on LinkedIn, Facebook or Email Marketing and not on Tiktok or Snapchat.

On the contrary, if you want to sell hand-made gifts, you would use platforms like Instagram, Pinterest or Facebook.

There are a lot of social media platforms and if you are present on each, then managing them is a problem. Also, if you are not identifying the best set of platforms for your product/services, you won’t be able to generate the desired results.

So after identifying the target audience, identify the platforms where your target audience is present.

#4. Create Engaging Content

After identifying the social media platforms, create content. But do not create content just for the sake of promoting your product or services. Create engaging content.

Content can be in the form of text, videos, images, infographics, e-books, etc.

I always say “Create Content Which Helps & Not Sells”

A very common mistake which people do on social media is that they directly create posts which sells.

If you just try to sell, you will not be able to engage people and build trust. But when you help and engage people, trust is built and it helps you in getting more leads and conversions.

This is the phase in which you must also identify a set of hashtags for your Social Media Marketing. Again, the hashtags must match the tone and theme of your content.

#5. Implement your social media marketing activities and analyze the results

By now, you know your audience, the platforms and also have some engaging content with you.

The next step is to create a social media content calendar. It can be weekly or even monthly. The content calendar is a plan that reflects which post will go live on which day and on which platform.

Publish the posts as per the social media calendar.

FREE Giveaway – You can download an amazing SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT CALENDAR TEMPLATE here – http://hubs.to/RW7jr

(As a HubSpot affiliate, I can give such giveaways to my readers. The template will help you a lot. If you purchase any HubSpot service/product, I might get a commission. But do not worry, you are not charged anything additional)

After making a social media calendar and publishing the posts as per schedule, the next thing which you are supposed to do is analyze the results of the social media marketing activities.

There is a reason why I have clubbed “Implement” and “Analyze” together. Both the activities are closely related to each other. You cannot analyze the results at the end.

You need to keep analyzing things on the go. As you execute, you should simultaneously analyze too. And on the basis of analysis, you can make changes in your implementation phase.

At times, you make mistakes in the first phase itself. That is you set wrong goals. But you are not able to identify the mistake early in the strategy formation phase. No issues.

In today’s world, you need to be AGILE and your Social Media Marketing should be AGILE too.

As you analyze your results, you will get certain insights which you would love to implement in your strategy. As soon as you realize the fact that your results are not as per your set goals, take a second look at your strategy and fix the wrong things.

Only when you would analyze, you would realize.

So analyze while you implement & form an awesome strategy for your social media marketing using the above framework.

Benefits of Social Media Marketing

We already saw that what is social media marketing, it’s importance and the process of creating a great social media marketing strategy.

As a brand or professional, if you are not yet understanding it’s importance and want more precise reasons to adapt and implement social media marketing, then here are few of the benefits:

• It helps in creating brand awareness
• SMM helps in listening to what customers say about you
• Engaging with customers by replying to their comments and helping them
• Nurturing leads and boosting conversions

It is not necessary that only digital marketers or social media marketers should learn social media marketing. A local vendor or freelance or even a professional can learn about it and use social media for personal branding.

How to learn Social Media Marketing?

Learning today is not difficult. There are a lot of resources available online. Also, there are a lot of free resources in the form of youtube videos, ebooks, blogs, podcasts, etc.

SMM is something which you must learn by doing.

For instance, if you want to learn Instagram Marketing, then make an Instagram Page, post content and experiment.

For Social Media Marketing, you need to know to write content and create graphics/videos.

You can create graphics online for free using a tool like Canva.
Read How To Design Social Media Graphics Online Using Canva?

Any Free Online Courses?

Yes, there are lot of free social media marketing courses available on the internet. I recommend you to learn from YouTube. I am of the opinion that in this digital age, you need not pay for a course, unless it is extremely essential.

The internet is free of high quality resources and you must learn from it.

I have written a blog on best free digital marketing courses. It might help you. There is Facebook Blueprint, Future Learn, Twitter Flight School and several other platforms that offers free courses on social media marketing.

Few other resources that might help you in beginning your social media journey:

• Twitter For Beginners
• Quora For Beginners
• How to create a LinkedIn Company Page?
• 4 ways to write better tweets
• All you need to know about Twitter lists
• How to create a Facebook Business Page?
• How to link Instagram to Facebook Page?
• 8 steps to make your LinkedIn profile All-Star

I have also interviewed a few social media experts and their journey is really inspiring. They have shared a lot of tips that might help you in Social Media Marketing.

A few of the Expert Speaks Interview of Social Media Marketing Experts are:

• Interview with India’s 1st Social Media Ph.D. holder – Dr. Khushbu Pandya
• Interview with social media and digital marketing expert – Sorav Jain
• Interview with an Edupreneur who has effectively used social media and excelled in her field – Sonali Dutta

As I produce more content that can help you in your social media marketing, I will keep updating the resource list above.

So, do not forget to bookmark this article and keep revisiting it once in a while to check if there is any update. Also, an easy way would be to follow me on Social Media as I keep posting about my latest articles over there.

I would be glad to help you if you have any further queries regarding social media marketing.

I hope you enjoyed reading this ultimate guide of social media marketing. Do not forget to share it on your social media platforms and feel free to comment your takeaways from this.

Happy Learning!