Social Media Marketing As a Platform For The Sale of Goods And Services

One of the primary features in the present online system is that the worldwide Internet is socializing at a breakneck pace. In addition to well-known social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, there are plenty of lesser-known platforms that are rapidly gaining an audience throughout the world.

Furthermore, the average user now spends 6 hours per day online, accounting for a third of their total waking time. Per day, almost one million people join social media for the first time, equating to more than 11 new users every second. The fact that social media has moved beyond entertainment for youngsters has fostered this growth. People of the elder generation have begun to use social networks as a platform for communication, research, and job.

The conclusion is self-evident: a large percentage of people go online only to use social media. And this audience is unique. For them, social networks have practically become synonymous with the term Internet, because just one or two websites can provide them with everything they require: communication, dating, videos, music, new knowledge, news, and, of course, shopping.

One of the most important duties of marketing is to be where there is a free niche - an untapped audience, thus a vast and busy environment like social media could not go unnoticed by marketers. Started to create unique tools in order to communicate with users as efficiently as possible. This is how Social Media Marketing (SMM) - a collection of activities aimed at promoting a business on social media - came to be.

Let's focus on the benefits of social media marketing.

1. Users prefer to share interesting content with their readers, friends, and subscribers, therefore Word of mouth is growing more active on these platforms. Social media uses two main approaches to word of mouth. The first approach can be called point sharing. It consists in targeting content about your product or service to potential customers in your surroundings. The second approach is social sharing via text posts on Facebook, short tweets on Twitter, or photo-video footage on Instagram. In terms of marketing, this approach is the most effective because it allows you to reach a larger audience than a targeted one.

This mechanism is used in viral marketing. Viral marketing is the creation of brand-related news feeds, content, interactive applications that users themselves share with their followers. The primary aim of viral marketing is to analyze the target audience's interests and needs for sharing information in order to generate viral content based on this study that users will distribute independently.

2. The next key benefit of social media is targeting. It involves concentrating a marketing campaign on a certain target market. Users that register submit a lot of information about themselves, such as their age, gender, geolocation, study, work, marital status, and so on. All of these details, which some users consider unimportant, are quite useful when working on social media platforms. You can use them to create interaction with potential users.

3. Interactive interaction. When it comes to traditional advertising (written publications, billboards, television, and so on), it's clear that connection with the audience is one-sided: the advertiser provides information about his product but receives no immediate feedback. In the case of social networks, this process is two-way: users may voice their ideas through private messages, comments, and polls, which, unlike traditional advertising, allows for a deeper contact with the public.

Based on the information presented above, we can conclude that well-built social media marketing can provide a company with significant benefits. It is necessary to choose a platform, typically a specific social network, before beginning the building of SMM.

The most popular application in the world is WhatsApp; nevertheless, because it is a social messenger, only point sharing is possible. As a result, we'll move on to the second most popular app in the world: Instagram, the photo-sharing social network.

Instagram is a free social media platform where users can publish photos and videos. This social network is a good place to advertise services and products because of the content visualization. In order to confirm this argument, a survey was conducted among Instagram app users aged 14-35. Only 0.5 percent of all respondents think print media advertising is a great marketing technique, 8.6 percent prefer television advertising, and the remaining 90.9 percent think social media advertising is the most effective.

We found that only 11.8 percent of respondents have an unfavorable opinion about advertising on Instagram, while the remaining 88.2 percent have a neutral, and in some cases, positive view. And 62.2 percent of all respondents purchased a product or service after seeing ads on Instagram, with 61.6 percent making multiple purchases.

For specific goals, it makes sense to use the SMART methodology. The SMART methodology is a modern approach to goal setting that makes goals more achievable and workable.

The development of a social media marketing strategy follows the goal-defining step. It is made up of several steps:

• The content of the profile is a very important aspect. Users don't like anonymity, they want to understand who they are subscribing to. For this you need to have a readable nickname (the best option is your brand name) without a lot of confusing numbers and letters; a bright and attractive profile photo (if you have a personal blog, then your high-quality, contrasting photo, if you have a brand - brand logo).
• Finding your target audience is the next step in excellent social media marketing. In terms of advertising, the target audience is defined as people who are more likely to buy a product or service [4]. After you've defined your target audience, you'll need to figure out where you should look for possible clients. It's preferable to search by geolocation (next to you), hashtags (related to your topic), competitors with an established audience, and users with similar offers (for example, you represent a salon of wedding and evening dresses, in which case you can carry out the search for the target audience among people active on the pages of leading events or a catering company).
• The next step is to create a content strategy. The major topics of publications; the frequency of publication; the style of publications; the time of publishing; the ratio of promotional posts to neutral posts are all parts of a content strategy.
• Promotion via social media often necessitates the spending of two sorts of resources: time and money. It's critical to figure out which tasks existing staff are capable of doing and which should be outsourced. Writing content for publications, generating page design, and editing images are the most common tasks that are outsourced.
• Last, but not least, is the evaluation of the effectiveness of the campaign. SMM, like other marketing tools, necessitates adjustment and optimization, so it's important to review the outcomes on a regular basis. It makes sense to track visitor conversions from many sources, such as a profile, ads from bloggers, targeted ads, hashtags, and so on. This will help you figure out which sources are the most useful.

It's important to keep in mind that social media marketing savings must be reasonable. You can't be fooled by methods like using bots to collect subscribers and likes using programs. This can result in a decline in reach and engagement, and, as a result, the entire marketing effort failing.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the essence of social media marketing?

The main objectives of marketing in social networks are considered to be brand promotion, increasing audience loyalty and fame, PR and increasing website traffic of various companies.