Social media is starting to become the front page of the internet. It is the first app opened on mobile devices and almost every site is infused with a link to some social media post. This drove companies to focus their marketing efforts on social media channels to keep up with the rising trends. It is of little doubt that social media presence is paramount to build any brand nowadays. And to take advantage, and keep up with the developments, companies hire social marketing teams in a ploy to share a cut in the exposure. This has given rise to social media companies, influencers and other social media marketing opportunities.
Social media companies came into prominence with only the promise of going through the intricacies of social media marketing build up for companies that hire them. But, what exactly do they given the huge sums they charge their partners? And are their efforts worth the social media mileage that they will give your brand? This article will try to answer all these questions about social media companies.
What they do
In a nutshell, social media companies will take over all the heavy lifting necessary to build social media presence for your brand. However, it is to be noted that most social media companies do not provide a complete solution to every need that your business may have. This means that you will have to make an effort to connect with various companies that offer different categories of social media services and these categories are:
Publishing
A social media company specializing in publishing will take care of all the publishing needs for you. The usual agreement between the company and your business will be summed up in a number of posts that you want to publish. The posts will try to drum up your business and will be especially written to for your brand. In addition, the company will also survey social media sites for trending posts that highlight content related to the industry of your business. This way, they can create content that will resonate better to customers of your brand and at the same time ride the wave that the current trend has started. The information needed for these are often obtained from good social media software developed by the social media company.
Audit
In any marketing endeavour, it is vital to quantify the results to measure the actual effectiveness of the campaign. Luckily, there are many tools available for use by social media companies which are endorsed by the social media sites themselves. This will allow the business to find out which areas they need to focus in when marketing their brand. The entire process objective is to create a fix based on the data obtained from the data derived from analytics. This fix should allow the company to find out how exactly to tackle the problem. Alternatively, there are many solutions that can complete the audit process for you although they may require a bit of explaining to understand the results.
Analysis
In the world where competitors rise and fall at the snap of a finger, it is truly vital for any business to see exactly how they stack up against each other. The competition landscape is not easy to plot given the ever changing nature of trends that is shaped by user web activity. The best way to know how well your brand is performing is by defining and comparing metrics of all businesses with similar offerings. Most importantly, to be able to find out how your competition is doing means knowing what to do and what not to do. Failing competitors will show which campaigns failed and that you should avoid them. After collating all these information, you can then instruct your marketing team to center a strategy based on hard data.
Strategy
Sometimes, businesses would rather outsource the entire social media marketing strategy to experts who know it better. Creating strategies may differ from business to business but the core process should retain a semblance to each other. This are things that social media company specializing in strategies should be able to help your business out with.
First, they will learn about your business and scope out competition to find out which ones work and doesn’t. After a few deliberation, they should be ready to present you the strategy and would launch at your approval. Finally, the effect of their strategy will be tightly compared to the outcome to measure the cost to profit ratio.
Engagement
Because social media is a free for all frenzy of ideas, thoughts and news, it may not be as easy to stand out in the crowd. This is where engagement comes in and becomes almost as vital as just getting your word out there.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO predates social media marketing as the way to advertise your product online. The two have a somewhat symbiotic relationship however in that SEO can enhance your social media presence and vise versa. The content in social media sites are still considered online content and thus search engines should still be treating them as such. This is true but there are some limitations on how much search engines can access because of some privacy settings.
Search engines are still the go to apps to use when finding anything online and results from posts in social media sites will doubly help your effort in promoting your business.
Other thoughts
While social media marketing is fairly established as an industry, it is worth noting that social media in itself is still growing. Many features as responds to current trends affects the way users consume social media. That in itself makes it much more difficult to pinpoint exactly what the best way is to take full advantage of social media in marketing. It is thus up to social media agencies to keep up with the changing trends of social media and the changing social media itself.
