What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing is a form of digital marketing that leverages the power of popular social media networks to achieve your marketing and branding goals. But it’s not just about creating business accounts and posting when you feel like it. Social media marketing requires an evolving strategy with measurable goals and includes:
- Maintaining and optimizing your profiles.
- Posting pictures, videos, stories, and live videos that represent your brand and attract a relevant audience.
- Responding to comments, shares, and likes and monitoring your reputation.
- Following and engaging with followers, customers, and influencers to build a community around your brand.
Social media marketing also includes paid social media advertising, where you can pay to have your business appear in front of large volumes of highly targeted users.
Benefits of social media marketing.

With such widespread usage and versatility, social media is one of the most effective free channels for marketing your business today. Here are some of the specific benefits of social media marketing:
- Humanize your business: Social media enables you to turn your business into an active participant in your market. Your profile, posts, and interactions with users form an approachable persona that your audience can familiarize and connect with, and come to trust.
- Drive traffic: Between the link in your profile, blog post links in your posts, and your ads, social media is a top channel for increasing traffic to your website where you can convert visitors into customers.
- Generate leads and customers: You can also generate leads and conversions directly on these platforms, through features like Instagram/Facebook shops, direct messaging, call to action buttons on profiles, and appointment booking capabilities.
- Increase brand awareness: The visual nature of social media platforms allows you to build your visual identity across vast audiences and improve brand awareness. And better brand awareness means better results with all your other campaigns.
- Build relationships: These platforms open up both direct and indirect lines of communication with your followers through which you can network, gather feedback, hold discussions, and connect directly with individuals.
The essentials of a successful social media marketing strategy.

A successful social media marketing strategy will look different for every business, but here are the things they will all have in common:
- Knowledge of your audience: What platforms they use, when they go on them and why, what content they like, who else they’re following, and more.
- Brand identity: What is the message you want to convey to your audience? How do you want them to feel when viewing your content?
- Content strategy: While there is a level of spontaneity on social, you’ll need a structured content strategy to be able to have a consistent voice and produce quality content regularly.
- Analytics: Quantifiable insights will inform your strategy, including who you’re reaching, the right content to share, the best times to post, and more.
- Regular activity: Social media is a real-time platform. If you want to use it to grow your business, you need to post regularly, stay on top of engagements with your business, engage back, keep up with trends, and maintain accurate profiles.
- Inbound approach: Don’t use social media to pitch your business. Focus on adding value through useful and interesting content and building up those around you. This, in turn, will organically promote your business and others will promote it for you.
Where attention lives.
Paid Social, Organic & Social Consultancy.
Need help reaching a larger audience on multiple platforms? Let us help you, from creating content for organic posts to creating copy for paid advertisements. Take a look below to see the different services we offer surrounding all things social media.

Consultancy
Already have an in-house social team but need some direction? We’re here to help! Our social team have experience working with some of the world’s biggest brands and are always on hand to share their expertise. Our account managers are trained on all Social platforms and can help with all your needs including ideas, creative, strategy, testing, tracking and delivering ROI from your campaigns.

Paid Social
There has never been a better time to use Paid Social. The platforms have put considerable time into expanding their ad offerings giving Social unique creative formats and targeting capabilities.
At Click Tap Media our team specialize in making the most of your assets and brand and helps get you in front of the right people at the right time. We hit customers at touchpoints throughout the sales funnel taking you from awareness right through to conversion.

Organic Social
With more than 2 billion users worldwide on Facebook alone, your business needs to be on Social Media. This is your avenue to create content that your customers care about and the perfect avenue to build relationships with your brand. There is no one better to sell your brand than your loyal customers, find them and give your advocates a platform to do your selling for you.

Influencer Marketing
Looking for influencers online but not sure who to go for? We have access to huge databases of influencers and will hand-pick the influencers no matter how specific your requirements. We show you the data behind our choices making sure you can be comfortable knowing you’re hitting your target audience.
Our database allows us to develop multi-influencer strategies allowing your campaigns to reach huge audiences and reinforce your key messages to your audience who hear it from multiple sources. This strategy elevates you above your competition and gives you a consistent brand message.
Creating your social media marketing plan.

Now that you know the essentials of a social media marketing strategy, it’s time to put it into action. Your social media marketing plan is the roadmap to carrying out your strategy. It puts structure around your efforts so you can measure your success and make sure you’re spending your resources wisely. Here’s how to create your social media marketing plan:
- Choose your platforms: Choose based on your target audience, platforms popular for your industry, as well as your bandwidth. Only take on the number of platforms you can actively keep up with. You can always start with one and then add on more slowly as you get the hang of them.
- Set goals and objectives: These should be simple and task-like to start, like a post once a day for a month, get your profiles set up, or do a competitive analysis. Once you get into a rhythm and gather insights, you’ll be able to set more specific and strategic goals like increasing your following by X% or publishing X [content types you’ve found your audience likes] per month.
- Report and adjust regularly:Use each platform’s analytics to identify which posts generate the most engagement, whether you’re getting more followers, and to see your audience demographics. Harness and scale up what works and nix what doesn’t.
Social media marketing tips.
Ready to get started with marketing on social media? Here are a few social media marketing tips to kick off your social media campaigns.

Create diverse content
Consistent with other areas of online marketing, content reigns supreme when it comes to social media marketing. Make sure you post regularly and offer truly valuable information that your ideal customers will find helpful and interesting. This includes:
- How-to’s, quick tips
- Local and industry news
- Data and insights
- Polls, questions, contests
- Updates and announcements
It also means making use of the variety of formats social media offers, including images, videos, stories, live streams, online stores, and more.
Social media platforms.

Facebook is the largest social media platform globally as well as one of the biggest local business directories. People of a diverse range of age groups use it to communicate with friends and family, participate in groups and forums, find and visit businesses near them, and follow brands. Facebook is a great social media marketing platform to:
- Build relationships with current customers
- Announce hours changes, events, and milestones
- Hold discussions and live streams
- Market to baby boomers
Organic reach on Facebook is limited, so if you’re looking to generate leads or find new audiences, Facebook advertising is your best bet.

YouTube
You may not think of YouTube as a social media marketing channel, but it fits the bill: you can post videos to your channel; share, comment on, and like other videos, and follow other accounts you like. Plus, you have a curated feed on your homepage with recommended videos. The key to social media marketing on YouTube is not to try to “go viral,” but to add value. It’s best for:
- Tutorials, how-to’s, and explainer videos
- Shoppable YouTube live streams
- Advertising (video ads and display ads on the platform)
- SEO (video is dominating the “how-to” SERP!)

Though it came onto the scene years after LinkedIn and Twitter, Instagram quickly surpassed those platforms and reached one billion monthly active users in 2018. It’s popular for its diverse content formats, including Feed posts, Stories, Lives, Reels, and IGTV. People use Instagram to follow influencers and brands they buy from and who support their personal values. Create your Instagram bio and then use it for:
- Social shopping
- Influencer marketing
- User-generated content
- Company culture
The cost of Instagram ads is generally higher than on Facebook, but the good news is that organic reach is also higher.

LinkedIn may be a professional network, but it’s also an inspiring community that celebrates leadership, learning, and core values. So in addition to using it to network, find prospects, and share industry insights, it’s also a great place to express your company culture and build your personal brand in parallel with your business brand. There are tons of LinkedIn company page features to take advantage of, so take care when building your page. LinkedIn is a great platform to:
- Attract top talent
- Network with partners, peers, and customers
- Share company milestones and culture
- Post industry news and insights

Snapchat
Snapchat isn’t just for teens. Its largest age group (75%) ranges from 13-34 and with Snap Maps, geofilters, and its partnership with Gannett, it’s more locally-focused than you might think. While you can’t build relationships on the platform, you can build an audience through fun images and short videos. Use Snapchat for:
- Location-based marketing
- App marketing
- Feel-good content

TikTok
TikTok is the fastest growing social media platform of all time, taking only five years to reach one billion monthly active users. While it’s known for dancing, there are countless popular categories on the platform that continue to grow. Businesses are finding ways to use it as a marketing channel, but just remember, the primary reason people use TikTok is for entertainment, so make sure your videos align with that. Use TikTok to:
- Participate in trending challenges
- Post funny and inspiring videos
- Be relatable
Start prioritizing your social media marketing strategy.
Using social media in marketing does more than improve site traffic and increase your reach. It turns your business into a personality that your audience can communicate and connect with on a deeper level.
Regardless of which platforms you use or how you use them, the most important thing to remember is that social media is not a platform to pitch your business. It’s a community for you to express your personality, demonstrate your values, share useful information, and build up those around you. With people naturally following you and promoting your content, there will be no need for pitching. And with this approach, you’ll achieve not just your business goals but all of the other intangibles that translate to gratification and fulfillment.