Studies suggest social media marketing is a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes to reach their prospective customers.

A lot goes on social media — Which offers a brilliant platform for brands to directly communicate with their audiences. This allows brands to get closer to customers, and be a part of their lives. But more importantly, it allows them to be a part of the customer lifestyle.

Social Media Marketing is a practice that includes creating and sharing posts (content) on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram to achieve business goals. This practice is gaining a good reputation in contemporary marketing strategies for about 3.1 billion use social media worldwide.

The social media marketing is gaining tremendous popularity among advertisers and marketers—the market is filled with social media marketing training centers—equipping learners with the necessary tools and knowledge to thrive in the cutthroat competition.

Social Media Marketing as a Business Tool

Advertisers and marketers use social media platforms to effectively expand and promote their businesses. These platforms are the virtual doors—as against the traditional doors marketers use to knock for door-to-door marketing—the only difference is that the scope got much bigger. This has proved that social media marketing is a critical tool that can be used in this era of digital disruption.

Researchers suggest that great marketing on social media can bring remarkable success to businesses. This, in turn, can build devoted brand advocates, further driving leads and sales.

Why Social Media Marketing is Important?

Well, it has a simple answer; it helps you meet your marketing goals. This further includes:

• Increasing website traffic 
• Building conversions
• Improving brand awareness
• Creating a brand identity and positive brand association
• Improving communication and interaction with key audiences

Businesses should try to gain a bigger audience and with it more customer engagements on social media networks. This will ensure businesses meet the challenges listed above.

Got inspired enough? Now, check out the following social media marketing tips before starting with marketing on social media and create a kickass social media campaign:

• Start with a thorough social media content planning.
• Create unique and appealing social content
• Build a consistent brand image
• Use social media for social promotion
• Share curated links
• Keep a track of competitors
• Measure success with analytics
• Managing social media crisis

If you’re planning to start a career as a social media expert it would be helpful to take up social media marketing training courses before entering the competition.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.