What Is Social Media Marketing (SMM)
The use of social media and social networks to sell a company’s products and services is referred to as social media marketing (SMM).
Companies can use social media marketing to communicate with existing consumers and reach out to new ones while also promoting their intended culture, mission, or tone. Marketers can track the performance of their efforts with social media marketing’s purpose-built data analytics tools.
Your organization has a social media strategy and a website, whether you’re an influencer, a non-profit creator, or a business owner. These two items should work together rather than separately.
Far too many businesses and brands make the mistake of compartmentalizing their website and social media marketing strategies.
In fact, your website should become the focal point of all of your marketing efforts, acting as the primary customer experience.
As a result, your primary objective should be to attract as many new and recurring clients as feasible. Consider your website to be an investment, and social media marketing to be a tool for maximizing that return.
With this parallel in mind, you can see how your website is a critical component of your social media activities and vice versa. Let’s look at how you may include your WordPress website in your social media marketing approach.
Drive Visitors to Your Social Channels
With several marketing tools and strategies at your disposal, visitors will reach your website in a number of ways. This means they might not be fully aware of your social media presence.
As a result, your website should actively work to inform visitors of your profiles on social media networks such as:
- YouTube
- Vimeo
- Snapchat
- Tumblr
- Any Other relevant platform
The most common method for firms to direct traffic to their social media channels is to strategically place social media icons on their websites. Most firms place the symbols in the website’s header or footer sections to avoid drawing the user’s attention away from the main content.
While many WordPress themes already have this capability built into their layouts or widgets, several plugins do as well. Two popular plugins are Social Icons and Jetpack. Additionally, you can use this WPBeginner article to create a unique social icon menu.
Another strategy is to include your social media feeds directly into your website. Some brands use a feed from a specific or branded hashtag, while others use their company’s social media feeds.
On the Magnolia Market website, for example, the most recent Instagram posts are displayed on the homepage. Under Armour’s website also shows their Instagram postings, allowing consumers to shop directly from their feed. REI pulls social media content from branded and popular hashtags like #OptOutside and posts it to their website.
The top tools to incorporate this social media function into your website include:
- Juicer
- Social Feed
- TwineSocial
- Social Streams
- Feed Them Social
Social Media Content Distribution
No matter whether your website contains online products or news articles, you want visitors to share your content with the world. Make it easy for them to do so by incorporating social media sharing functionalities into your WordPress website. Several plugins are available for this capability, such as:
- Floating Social
- SumoMe Share
- Social Warfare
- Easy Social Share Buttons for WordPress
- AddtoAny
- Click to Tweet
- Pinterest “Pin It” Buttons
When you add these plugins to your WordPress website, users will have the ability to share your content with a few quick clicks. These social media sharing tools help to further your content distribution efforts and improve brand recognition for your company.
In addition, you can remind users to share your content by leveraging your voice! At the end of a blog article, remind users to share. Or, if producing video content, include a reminder at the ending, as well.
Your Social Media Content Lives on Your Website
The majority of the information you create for social media requires a place to “live.” While photographs and videos can be shared directly on social media sites, blog articles, news updates, and other types of content require their own website.
This is one of your website’s many functions. Furthermore, the major purpose of creating and sharing blogs or other material as part of a social media or inbound marketing plan is to direct users back to your website.
You can then show visitors more engaging material or possibilities, such as recommended articles or non-intrusive pop-up offers, once they’ve arrived on your website.
To track these social media content efforts, experts either use UTM parameters within Google Analytics or specific tracking links such as bitly. These data points tell marketing teams which social media tactics and blog content are working well to generate traffic to the content.
A Website to Achieve Social Media Goals
While social media is only one tool in the ever-evolving digital marketing toolbox, a website can assist marketers in achieving a variety of social media objectives. You can change your website’s content and layout to help with social media goals thanks to WordPress’s flexible and dynamic nature.
Assume you’re holding a social media competition. Remind visitors to join up with a simple section on your homepage. Alternatively, if you’re aiming to promote a branded hashtag, use the feeds mentioned earlier to include it in your website design.
This will increase the number of “eyes” who see and consider using the hashtag. You can also subtly implement this hashtag throughout the website copy.
Plus, all major social media campaigns rely on well-designed and executed landing pages. Where do these landing pages live? Your website You can launch and hide campaign-specific landing pages as needed to meet and exceed your social media marketing goals.
Also, rely on your website’s analytics to help inform your social media marketing strategy. For instance, look at the website traffic derived from social media for a particular blog post.
Is it lower than desired? This could be due to a number of social factors you may need to adjust for, such as:
- When did you post the article on social media?
- Did you promote the article using Facebook or Twitter ads?
- Was the article’s content relevant to your audience?
- Where did you distribute the article on social media?
- Was the social media post copy engaging?
With analytics data, you can analyze everything from the traffic to your website to the demographics of website visitors. Use this information to influence your social media strategy, as well.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Social media marketing campaigns have the advantage of appealing to a broad audience at once. For example, a campaign may appeal to current and prospective customers, employees, bloggers, the media, the general public, and other stakeholders, such as third-party reviewers or trade groups.
But these campaigns can also create obstacles that companies may not have had to deal with otherwise. For example, a viral video claiming that a company’s product causes consumers to become ill must be addressed by the company, regardless of whether the claim is true or false.
Even if a company can set the message straight, consumers may be less likely to purchase from the company in the future.
Websites and Social Media: A Unified Force
It’s clear that websites and social media marketing efforts must work collaboratively, not as siloed-off assets. Instead of separating these entities, combine them to your advantage.