How does digital marketing on social media work?

How does digital marketing on social media work?

1. 1. Suppose you own a company and want to expand or improve your digital presence or even start an online business through e-commerce. In that case, it is essential to know, even in an introductory way, what the possibilities of digital marketing are within social media. To achieve this, it is necessary to understand how these media work, how they are structured and what they are for.

Social media x social networks

1. 1. We are used to calling Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms, but we sometimes see the term “social media” coined. In reality, is there any difference?
   2. According to experts, yes. The term “social network” has changed over time. Still, one of the first records in which it appears comes from sociology and anthropology and has nothing to do with technology but the grouping of people with shared interests and who live together in the same space. Given this, we can consider examples of social networks: family, friends, college and work colleagues, among others.

But why is it important to know the difference between social networks and social media?

1. 1. Once we understand social networks from the perspective of groups with shared interests and who live in the same space, we can conceptualize social media as an interactive digital environment that groups different social networks—make sense? In other words, on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.), we can add people from various social networks from the “offline world”.
   2. Speaking of the offline world, it is essential to highlight that offline social networks are separated in time-space: it is tough for us to be with family, friends, co-workers and college colleagues simultaneously. In the online world, these social networks converge, as sharing a meme will reach the feed of our friends, boss and uncles.
   3. At first, these relationships may seem attractive, but social media becomes an environment where communication noise frequently occurs, so you must be careful. Bringing this context to the light of digital marketing, we can understand the importance of target audience segmentation for creating campaigns, for example.

The importance of social media for digital marketing: reach, resonance and relevance

1. 1. With social media, we monitor, measure, and estimate to analyze. We can observe, for example, a publication’s reach, resonance and relevance and measure it to analyze audience, engagement and influence.
   2. Reach is a quantitative indicator and refers, for example, to how many reactions or likes a publication obtained, how many views a YouTube or IGTV video has had, and how many followers a personality or page has. Generally, people only look at the range, and although it is essential when combined with other indicators, it can only tell us a little.
   3. Resonance, in turn, is a quantitative indicator that tells us how much a publication managed to reverberate on social media (how many shares did it have on Facebook or Instagram? How many retweets on Twitter?)
   4. It is worth mentioning that resonance is an indicator with a high degree of importance because when a user shares the publication, he is expanding it from his original page and taking it to his feed and, consequently, to his audience, reaching people who may become familiar with a particular product, service or brand.
   5. Last but not least, relevance is a qualitative indicator and without further ado, it will inform us how impactful the content was for those who received it. It is usually the most costly indicator to measure by its degree of abstraction, while the others are more objective.
   6. A practical example for measuring relevance is when a digital influencer is hired to promote a product, service or brand itself and achieves a good reach and good resonance in his post, but for another reason than the main objective of the investment, such as when her followers make comments interested in the personality itself or her personal life, and not in what she is promoting. In this case, the publication had good reach and sound resonance, but it needed to be revised to what was proposed.

After all, what is social media for in my marketing strategy?

1. In a general and summarized way, social media expresses the different facets of society and shows us consumer demands that still need to be met (partially or fully) and market opportunities. But basically, social media is used in digital marketing for three things:
   1. 1. Give visibility: with social media, it is possible to give visibility to brands, profiles, people and content. Before the exponential growth in the population’s access to the Internet, one of the biggest problems marketing faced was the need for more visibility to some demands. With the rise of social media, these demands became more visible and, in parallel, the market found new sales opportunities.
   2. Identify popularity: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other media brought a new perspective on popularity and media power. Through these platforms, it is possible to identify how popular a profile, influencer or page is with its audience.
   3. Promote interactivity: Effectively transforming how the public not only consumes but relates to brands, the promotion of interactivity differs from TV, Radio and other conventional communication vehicles, which have the consumer/spectator much more passive, both information regarding advertisements and advertisements. On social media, users want to interact effectively with your brand and ask questions via Messenger, chat or comments. Depending on their experience, you can gain their loyalty (or, on the other hand, lose them if they have a terrible experience).
   4. It is worth highlighting that indicators and metrics cannot and should not be analyzed individually; they must be considered as a whole so that your digital marketing strategy on social networks can achieve the desired objectives.
   5. Therefore, to consolidate an effective digital presence that will provide accurate results (whether increasing traffic to your website, improving lead capture or expanding your brand’s visibility), it is essential to invest in a specialized team or hire an agency of digital marketing.
2. If you are interested and want to know more about social media, e-commerce and digital marketing, read also:
   1. 1. The importance of social media for companies;
   2. Why hire a digital marketing agency;
   3. Why invest in e-commerce for my business?