Social media marketing is the marketing technique that uses social media platforms to connect to the audience to build brand value, increase sales and web traffic. This is driven by delivering precise, well structured quality content on the social media profiles. Social media marketers listen to their audiences closely, engage their audience, analyze the results and run the social media advertisements. Facebook or Meta (recently renamed), Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube and Snapchat are the most popular social media platforms today. 

There are various tools to manage social media to help businesses to gain the most out of the audience profiles and the platform. Buffer is one of the management tools used to build brand value, to grow the business and such other things. 

There are five major verticals that contribute to the success of social media marketing when applied right. They are:

• Strategy: Deciding on the strategy is the first step before publishing any article on any platform. Some of the businesses use social media just to increase the brand value, while the others to drive website traffic and increase sales. When used right, it generates engagement around the brand, creates a community and also serves as customer support. It is important to choose the right social media platform that your customers are on instead of publishing the article on all the platforms. Design the content that uses share wisely and precisely. It is important to analyze what type of content will attract the customers the best, like images, video, or links. Structure the content differently for different categories like educational, entertainment and others. Create a marketing persona to solve the requirements. The strategy chosen can be iterated or changed at any point of time based on the requirement.  

• Planning and Publishing: Social media marketing must follow a consistent presence on social media. Close to three billion people out of the total population use social media. These platforms will help the business be discovered by the customers. Sharing articles can be as simple as posting a blog on social media, like an image, or a video. The content has to be planned and designed ahead instead of creating and sharing it spontaneously. Businesses must ensure to deliver the quality content at the right time analyzing the frequency. Social media scheduling tools like Buffer will help the marketers to publish the content automatically at the designated time, allowing the marketers to reach the audience when they are most likely to engage with the content, saving time.

• Listening and Engagement: A post shared by a business might share many conversations that the organization might not be aware of. Social media listening and engagement tools can help organizations filter these conversations, take them as valuable inputs, target if they are potential driving statements or iterate according to the audience's interests. The executives have to follow the profile closely to understand the demand. 

• Analytics: Sharing the content is just not sufficient. The business must analyze how marketing is performing on social media platforms, understand the statistics, check the comparison performance, positive mentions, how many customers follow it, etc. Social media provides basic information on these things, but to analyze it in-depth, tools like Buffer will help better.

• Advertising: Advertising is the face of marketing. The business value is increased, sales is achieved and all the other tasks depend on advertising the brand, product or service. Advertisements have to be attractive, precise and according to the needs and desires of the customers. It has the potential to take the business on the top of the hit list. 

The Social Media Marketing certificate course offered by Great Learning will walk you through topics like what is social media marketing, tools and techniques, advertising, and such other things. It is one of the Digital Marketing verticals. At the end of the course, you will be able to master social media marketing and develop the sales, web traffic and build the brand value. You will receive a certificate after the successful completion of the course. Happy Learning!