What Are The 5 Main Pillars Of Social Media Marketing?

What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing involves using social media platforms to promote products, services, or brands. It involves creating content personalized for each social platform, listening to their sentiments, engaging with followers, and analyzing the results to refine future strategies.

As social media continues to evolve, mastering key pillars is crucial for running effective and powerful social campaigns. 

5 Pillars of Social Media Marketing

The key pillars of social media marketing are:

1. Strategy

Strategy is the foundation of every social media marketing campaign. It involves defining your goals, understanding your audience, choosing the right platforms, and the type of content that will resonate best with your audience.

Strategy is like a guide that tells you what you are trying to accomplish, how you are trying to accomplish it, and how you will know when it is being published.

Social media strategy includes: 

• Setting a SMART goal

SMART Goal: By the end of the quarter, the number of followers on Instagram will increase by 15% over the last quarter.

Specific: Increase followers on Instagram
Measurable: Track the number of followers on Insta by 15%
Attainable: Consider time, resources and growth
Relevant: Align with the company's target audience
Time-bound: Increase followers by 15% on Instagram by the end of the quarter

• Identifying target audience

Once the goal is set up for camping, the next step in building your social media strategy is defining your target audience.

Who are you trying to reach? Understanding your audience's demographics, interests and behaviors is crucial for creating content that speaks to them.

• The type of content to post

What topics will your content be? You need to consider what content bucket the post will fit into. Content bucket: Categories to group your marketing content.

Common Bucket Include:

1. Entertaining
2. Educational
3. Inspirational
4. Conversational
5. Promotional

• Choose social platform

Choose based on this consideration: How different platforms work, consider your target audience's preferred platform, business and marketing goals, your company (product, identity, and business types), competitors, and resources that the company has.

2. Planning and Publishing

Once the strategy is set, the next step is to plan and publish your content. When and how often to post on social media is more crucial than ever before.

• Content calendar: Organize your post in advance to run a continuous flow of content.

• Content type: Pick the format of your post - whether it is an image, video, infographic, blog link, or user-generated content.

• Schedule post: Use a social scheduling tool to schedule posts in advance for the appropriate time.

3. Listening and Engagement

Social media marketing is not just about posting content, it's also about listening to conversations around the brand. Listening helps you understand public sentiment towards your brand and how you can improve your business decisions.

Two steps involve:

• Social listening: Monitor social media mentions of your brand and relevant keywords to stay informed of what conversations are happening. It helps you address concerns, identify trends, and find new opportunities.

• Engagement: Engage with users by responding to their comments, this shows that you care about their words.

4. Analytics and Reporting

Analyzing social media success is crucial for optimizing your strategy, reaching your objectives, and making well-informed choices. Analytics provides what's and what's not to help make data-driven decisions.

• Key performance indicators (KPIs): Identify metrics that matter most to business goals, such as - Shares, applause rate, referrals, conversions, and customer testimonials.

• Platform analytics tools: Use built analytics provided by platforms such as  Meta Business Suite and Twitter Analytics.

5. Paid Media

Organic reach is valuable, social media advertising or sponsored marketing helps to reach broader. Examples of paid media are pay-per-click advertising, branded content, and influencer-generated content.

• Define your objective 

• Determining your audience

• Choose your social platform

• Campaign duration

• Set campaign budget

• Create and upload campaign creatives

• Launch campaign

Wrap up

Understanding and implementing the five pillars of social media marketing - you can create a strong social media marketing strategy, enhance your brand awareness, and broaden your social presence.

Consistency, engaging with followers, analyzing results, and utilizing social media advertising can help businesses fully realize the potential of social media marketing to achieve their goals and drive growth.