What Is Social Media Marketing and How It Can Transform Your Company?

History of Social Media

The beginning of social media began in the mid 1800’s with the use of the telegraph machine. While it may not be what the world is familiar with now, according to Merriam-Webster, it is. Social media is “forms of electronic communication”, and over time as technology progressed, the ways to transfer information came along with it. Now in the 21st century, people all over the world are connected through the use of social media, and its use has become so common it would be difficult to find someone who doesn’t utilize it in some form. Which is why many businesses are using it to develop their status and presence. Social media has evolved from its roots of communicating with others, to being a tool used to elevate the brands of businesses, effectively boosting sales, engagement with customers, and so much more. That is the goal of social media marketing.

Benefits

Just like the platforms, social media marketing has evolved from being a way to promote a company, to achieving organizational goals. Here are some of the benefits of using it to market your brand:

• Improved New Product Development (NPD), the process of conceptualizing, designing, planning, and commercializing a new product in an effort to bring it to market.

• Development of different organizational capabilities, such as an organization’s ability to engage customers, derivation of value from information and knowledge acquisition, generation of new ideas for products and services, adaption of organizational processes, and seizing of entrepreneurship opportunities.

• Develop knowledge of different organizational capabilities, such as innovation capability, absorptive capacity, and organization unlearning. Innovation capability is a firm's ability to identify new ideas and transform them into new/improved products, services or processes that benefit the firm. Organizational unlearning allows the business to discard processes and models that are rendered obsolete based on engagement. Absorptive capacity is the ability to find new information and incorporate it to attain business goals.

• Acquisition of externally generated knowledge leads to performance gains. By giving customers, the chance to interact with the brand and other users, the product can evolve to better serve their needs.

• Improvement of marketing performance, such as brand awareness, customer acquisition, customer satisfaction, customer retention, and service quality

• Increase in thought leadership and innovation performance. Thought leadership is the extent to which a customer recognizes the business as an industry leader or a go-to resource to its field of expertise.

Reap the Rewards

While the benefits are endless, there are certain elements to be aware of when starting a social media page for a brand:

• Posts should require almost no effort for its users to interact with. More effort means less engagement, and one way to relieve this problem is to make posts more vivid.

• Vividness will solve some problems, but the post also has to relate to the customer. Oftentimes social media managers are more than willing to create content, but the effort is mute if it doesn’t connect with the audience. This is called lack of control over message diffusion. Typically, the acquisition and analysis of data solves this problem.

• The acquisition of data requires a dedicated social media marketing team. One of the pitfalls that firms usually struggle in creating relevant content is keeping up with the fast-evolving nature of platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, etc. By employing a team, the content generated for the company will properly engage the targeted audience, acquire and analyze the data required to repeat the cycle.

Now What?

Platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok have been a great tool used to spread a company’s brand, ultimately leading to important financial performance. Below you will find one of the companies that we worked with and how using the strategies mentioned above, significantly increased their social media presence leading to an increase in sales and engagement.

How social media marketing improved a company's engagement and conversions after hiring Trend Media

We hope you enjoyed reading this article! For any additional social media marketing help, contact Trend Media.