This Podcast is FREE! Donations are appreciated https://busk.co/loganSocial media marketing has come a long way in the last several years and has changed the way many businesses think about marketing in general. For some marketers, social followers have replaced email addresses, posts and tweets have replaced promotional emails, and likes have replaced email opens. Virtually every successful business today has not only a social media presence, but a clearly defined social media strategy. Most of these strategies revolve around posting consistent content. But it’s more than just posting promotions and offers. A successful social strategy will include various types of nonpromotional content for various types of goals. Posting about a charitable cause associates your brand with feelings of goodwill. Posting about trendy topics makes your brand seem relevant. Posting useful tips without a sales pitch makes your business come off as genuinely helpful. Posting humorous or “feel-good” content associates your business with positive emotions, and so on. But more importantly, these types of non-promotional posts are accomplishing two other goals. First, they are encouraging social sharing, which grows your following even more. Secondly, they are creating top-of-mind awareness for your brand. People will get used to seeing your content and your business name, logo, and USP. As a result, when they have a problem that your business fixes, they will be more likely to think of you first. All those social media concepts revolve around organic activity. However, the major social media platforms today have also developed robust paid advertising systems. The most game-changing of these has been the concept of social “native advertising”. Native advertising refers to advertisements that have the appearance of organic content except for a tiny one-word disclaimer somewhere designating it as “sponsored” or an “advertisement”. This new form of paid social media advertising has proven to be remarkably effective because social media consumers are already in the habit of looking at, consuming, and engaging with anything that looks like an organic post in their social feeds. In addition to this, the line between organic posts and paid native ads have become increasingly blurred as these native ads act and function just like organic content (they can be shared, liked, etc.) and businesses now can pay to promote an organic post to give it further reach. Now that we have discussed social marketing in general, let’s have a closer look at each of the top social media platforms in more detail. Facebook One could argue that there has truly never been anything like Facebook. The undeniable king of social networks took the web by storm several years ago and has since become a household name. Almost everyone has a Facebook account (and about 3/4 of all U.S. adults check it regularly). There is simply no other platform so consistently and universally used all around the globe.For many businesses and organizations, their Facebook presence has replaced their actual website (at least in importance) because people are more likely to interact and receive updates there. Is there a blackout in your city or an emergency in your local area? There is a good chance the power company or news agencies will be posting updates on Facebook more quickly and consistently than their own websites. Why? Because that is where everybody is. And you need to be where your audience is. Facebook has done an excellent job of developing an environment where people stay inside the platform. Although links to the outside are easy to create, it’s now just as easy and perhaps more beneficial to keep things inside Facebook. For example, until a couple years ago, most people who wanted to share videos did so by linking to a Youtube video. Today, however, Facebook has made it both quick and easy to upload videos within the platform and has even made it the best option by allowing Facebook videos to autoplay as people are scrolling through their newsfeeds, making this option the most beneficial for people doing the sharing and the most pleasing for those doing the consuming. The result? After years of this sort of structuring and positioning, Facebook users now actually feel more comfortable when they remain inside Facebook. People trust and feel safe with the Facebook interface and prefer to consume content inside of it. Hence the enormous success of Facebook Native Ads. The point is, if you want to market your business or brand in the place where your audience spends most of their time and in a context in which they feel most comfortable (hint: you do), then you need to be marketing on Facebook. To fully get the point across, here are some for statistics that will give you a fuller appreciation of Facebook’s size, reach, and importance. Almost 40% of the entire world’s online population is on Facebook. Of the remainder who do not use ...
