Social media is an exceptionally huge platform to be exploited by the small scale businesses as well as the huge conglomerates. From educational institutes sharing Ads on Facebook to women who make DIY videos on YouTube every business depends or requires the huge support of the social media platforms to promote business for the engagement of their users and also to reach them in various ways. Getting traffic on your website is the only objective of SMO. In SMO the users are the products and businesses depend solely on how the users respond to the content they are provided with.
The idea of SMO is very simple i.e. to make sure a website or a link receives additional links to highly visible and popular social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. The websites of these businesses must undergo changes in its content based on the current requirement such as using very relatable words and hashtags which corresponds to the data we wish to share. It is also necessary to identify the type of audience we are engaging with or we wish to target. With persuasive content and considering the appropriate keywords for the right audience a lot can be achieved in very less time. Nowadays, all the social media platforms to promote business are interlinked and dependent on each other to which can wisely be used to propel a certain business. You can also look for digital marketing agencies offering SMO services for brand awareness, leads generation and driving potential traffic on website.
Social Media Platforms to Promote Business
SMO can help us achieve goals like
- Creating brand awareness.
- Building conversations.
- Creating a unique identity for your brand.
- Easy of reach to your audience and having real-time feedback.
- Having a social impact.
1. Facebook
Facebook is the biggest social media platform on the internet, to boast this statement it flaunts a whopping 2.2 billion monthly active users. With this amount of traffic on it, it is the perfect place to expand and grow your business and reach millions of specific users by very limited steps. It offers marketers ‘the most data’ and ‘the most targeted’ ads.
Facebook Advertisement
Facebook Ads is the perfect tool for the businesses to reach a very specific audience bifurcating them according to various filters such as age, profession, location and also if a user has pets. Facebook provides a lot of options to post content based on texts, images, photos, videos, gifs, etc. To advertise on Facebook first we need to get in touch with the various tools that are on offer to manage the page. The most important tool for this purpose is the Facebook Business Manager tool. This is free to use tool which can be used as the hub to manage advertisements, people, and the entire page. Facebook allows segmenting a wide range of people into smaller ones which makes it easier for the businesses to advertise on this platform. We can choose to target people based on their demographic, device, age, interests, and loads of other characteristics. First of all, we need to define the primary goal of the campaign like drive traffic to your website, drive conversions, promote your Facebook Page, get engagement on your post, or something else. Once the audience that is performing well on the pages or the post that are delivered, once the target audience identified which can take a significant amount of time. Lookalike audiences can be generated to further use which increases the reach and traffic on the page which is our sole purpose in SMO.
2. Instagram
Instagram did exceptionally well as soon as it was launched, with the upgrading technologies there was a considerable increase in the qualities of pictures that were clicked through mobile phones back in 2012. With the perfect timing it was a smashing hit, within 3 months it had reached a million downloads. Instagram is a photo-sharing social media platform. Now along with its competitors, it has also added video sharing, live videos, IGTV and many more functionalities.
INSTAGRAM Marketing strategies
The Instagram is a platform where photo sharing takes place and other users may it be family, friends or the general user can view and like your posts. Instagram currently is the most engaging social media platform because of its simple user interface. The Instagram posts can be very efficiently used by adding relevant hashtags to keywords. Instagram is a perfect platform for the micro influencers, because of its pure visual content. It is a common practice nowadays that the micro influencers advertise or endorse local products, making it easier for the user to relate to brands and products. Brands allot a huge amount of money to these micro influencers, according to a survey 65% of brands participate in micro influencer marketing. Marketing on Instagram depends on how engaging content you are providing the users if the users are engaged for quite a while and they love your page then they surely are going to pay attention to what products you use or what products you suggest. Instagram can also be used by the businesses or event management organizations to provide snippets or glances of a certain event. Be it a poster or a short video of behind the scenes. So we can make that Instagram is winning big.
3. YOUTUBE
YouTube boasts a supermassive 1 billion monthly users, this social network has changed the way of online video streaming. It is a platform for many creators to showcase their work, a certain set of skills. YouTube proved to be an absolute game changer by giving a perfect platform for the creators, may it be entertainment or educational purposes or even by producing videos ads on YouTube.
YouTube Monetization:
After a certain point of time when your page is getting decent views, the account can be applied for YouTube monetization. The YouTube partner program allows users to monetize their content and earn money through the advertisements on their videos and from YouTube premium subscribers watching their content. On January 16th, 2018, YouTube upgraded its eligibility criteria for the YouTube Partner Program. Once a channel reaches 4,000 watch hours in the previous 12 months and 1,000 subscribers it will be reviewed by the YouTube Team and allow the creator to join the program. These steps were taken by YouTube to strengthen their requirements for the monetization so that they can prevent any spammers, impersonators, and other bad actors don’t take undue advantage of the YouTube Ecosystem and continue to reward the creators with original and great content.
Gateway to YouTube:
Other social media platforms can be a great tool to bring traffic to your own channel. Other social media platforms can work as an excellent gateway to your content on YouTube by giving excerpts, snippets, and previews of the videos. A tiny teaser can raise the curiosity among your audience keeping them engaged to you channel to what happens next or what happens actually in the video in the complete video.
YouTube video ads:
YouTube video ads are also an amazing way for the small-scale businesses to showcase their product and advertise their business. The YouTube video ads provide visibility to the wide range of audience and help grow the business to the next level. Different strategies prevail for the different type of businesses. There are basically two types of video ads that are available for the businesses to choose from
- Skippable video ads
- Non-skippable ads
Skippable video ads are also called as TrueView ads. These ads again can be classified into two parts ‘Instream ads’ and ‘In-display’ ads. Non-skippable ads can be at times backfire as they are forceful ads which cannot be skipped and the viewers who wish to view a video on YouTube are compelled to watch the entire advertisement which may even not be of their interest too. They also have a specified length for it to stream on YouTube, that is not the case with the Non-Skippable ads.
4. LinkedIn
LinkedIn is not as huge as the Facebook. In fact, it has been around more than Facebook has been. It was found back in 2002 by Reid Hoffman, one of the early members of the PayPal. LinkedIn has proven to be one thing for sure that it was very profitable right from the very start. Because of its premium subscription and other freemium options which proved to be very effective. LinkedIn focused on one thing right from the start that it focusses on business and only business. Soon this was realized by the users and started utilizing it to the fullest.
What LinkedIn offers for the businesses
LinkedIn is all about being professional and connect to the other working professionals of the same field or other too. LinkedIn allows users to build the network and communicate with the people and get to know what’s new in the industries and stay ahead in this age of immense competition. LinkedIn allows forming groups just like Facebook groups. The only difference between them is that LinkedIn is only for business personnel. It is a place where ideas can be exchanged, discuss topics of interests or establish their expertise. Joining these groups and being expert in a topic related to your business and providing expertise in these topics can bring credibility to your business and more and more people would want to work with you.
Advertising on LinkedIn :
As people on LinkedIn engage with only business. It is a great platform to advertise small businesses. People here might pay serious attention to your business as users here are for this sole purpose. It is also very suitable to B2B category businesses and marketers believe it is proving to be the most effective platform across all the social media platforms.
5. Twitter :
Twitter is where all the conversation takes place. Its rampant growth of daily active users on this platform is proving to be a very beneficial tool for the companies and small-scale businesses to grow and reach out to more and more people. It is a platform where almost all the celebrities and dignitaries express their thoughts and views about anything from politics, movie review etc. So people have started taking Twitter very seriously and so have marketers. With a proper plan and a few suitable steps, it can work wonders for your business.
Advertisements and promotion on Twitter
Twitter can be used to provide links to your website which can, in turn, increase the traffic on your page. Twitter has limits on the characters that can be used in a tweet, so providing links can be handy but obviously, it has to be very creative to attract users to your post and clicking on your link.
There are 3 types of advertisements available on Twitter:-
- Promoted accounts.
- Promoted Tweets.
- Promoted trends.
Promoted accounts.
Twitter promotional accounts will give visibility to your account to the users searching for similar content as yours. This can be very useful for you and the user that is searching for something similar to your business and you may reap the benefits of it.
Promoted tweets:-
The purpose of this is simple you pay so that users who don’t follow you also can view these tweets. Again it will we be focused on your target audience and depends on the history of searches they have made. It will show up in the timeline and search results of those users who don’t know your brand or company.
Promoted trends:-
The hashtags ‘#’ has become an integral part of almost all the social media platforms. And the same goes for Twitter. Trending topics on Twitter are displayed in the search bar. People can get to know about your brand by these trending topics. The promoted tweet is linked to these hashtags. And as the user clicks on it, the promoted tweet opens up.
This is how social media platforms for promoting business an play vital role in getting more exposure to your business and help to reach the next milestones.