Episode 15 of the Digital Marketing Creators Podcast, we are going to venture off into social media marketing. Stay tuned.

Welcome to the Digital Marketing Creators Podcast where we help creators and entrepreneurs just like you magnify your brand message through digital marketing tips and strategies, and now your host Andre Vaughn.

As a creator, or entrepreneur, you have so many things coming your way in terms of online marketing, digital marketing, and it can be so confusing, but we broke it down in this free mini course that we have, it's called the five day digital marketing mini course. And you can get that at DigitalMarketingCreators.com/free-mini-course or anywhere on that website, you should see something where you can sign up for that free course. And it's not a long course either as a real short course. And you know, we didn't want to take up a lot of your time when we put it together. But it kind of guides you through different aspects of of digital marketing, and we try to keep it condensed for you. So check that out at Digital Marketing creators.com/free-mini-course.

The world of social media and social media marketing. It's a man can you just look in and see how far along this thing has become from actually the time that you've personally been on social media until now. It's been a while it's been a while these years a stalking on each other? It's a it's a young technology. But for the most part it's getting up there. It's getting up there. So the Facebook's the Twitter's, and do we have the new comers, the TikToc's, and all of that.

So it's pretty, it's pretty, pretty crazy to think about, but just looked up on Investopedia their definition of social media marketing and they say the term social media marketing refers to the use of social media and social networks to market a company's products and services. It also says Social Media Marketing provides companies with a way to engage with existing customers and reach new ones while allowing them to promote their desired culture, mission or tone.

Social media marketing, has purpose built data analytics tools that allow marketers to track the successes of their efforts. They also say social media has changed the way we function as a society, I can attest to that I can think we all can agree. Agree with that. It says including the way we connect with one another. As platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram took off businesses also took notice, they began to use the sites to further their interests through social media marketing. And that's because the sites are able to change consumer behavior, consumer behavior, where is the attention at all we say that, where's the attention at where's the attention going? Look, no further social media marketing.

It also says, um, real quick social media websites allow marketers to employ a broad range of tactics and strategy to promote content, and have people engage with it. Many social networks allow users to provide detailed graphical, demographic and personal information it says, which enables marketers to tailor their messages to what is most likely to resonate with users.

And that entire last couple of sentences that I just reeled off of that entire paragraph that I just wrote off it, it puts me in a mindset of, I used to always wonder to myself, Man, it seems like somebody's following me around. And then you start noticing, you know, you went on a website. Then after you went on a website, you were on, you know, you logged on your your Facebook app, and you logged on your Instagram app, and he's saying people got ads, and it's like, they're following you.

So that's a method of social media marketing with using pixels and, you know, pay per click advertising, and things like that, and you know, all implement social media marketing at the same time, buffer. Buffer SE is let me see what buffer buffer says about social media marketing. Actually, they break it down. They have the five core pillars of social media marketing, and it's so true, just just looking at it as it has. Its five pillars of strategy, planning and publishing, listening engagement, analytics, and reporting and advertising.

And that's Pretty much what I what I've been reeling off. So you with social media marketing, you must have a strategy, you must have, definitely have a strategy in mind whether it's, you know, producing, producing content, you know, you want to make sure, first of all, you have to understand the particular platform that you're on, have to understand the platform that you're on, whether it's Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, any of these, because they always say this, they're all different. But the way you use them may have a lot of similarities.

In terms of if you're, you know, if you're trying to push content out, and, you know, grow a community. So it's not good to just plaster your stuff, all over social media, I think you have to do more engagement, you have to do more, like sharing and commenting, before you plaster all of your, your blog, posting your videos, and all of that stuff. Now, over time, as you build a community, on social media, you know, your approach skin, you know, it can it can do, no doubt, you should always interact, because that's what it is social media.

But as your community grows, maybe you can send some out on your, you know, Facebook, and it'll get shared X amount of times, and so on and so forth. They speak about the, you know, in terms of strategy, you know, understanding your brand awareness, generating engagement, and what type of platforms should you want to focus on? And that's a whole nother discussion in itself. You know, what type of content do you want to share?

Pretty much it should be something in terms of, you know, images, videos, texts, even audio now, articles, infographics, you know, is it educational or entertaining content. So those are things that you have to take into consideration. When you have a when you start to develop a strategy planning, in publishing, sort of, just like what we spoke about, in terms of, you know, what, you know, what the, what type of content do you want to put out, but before you do that, you have to plan, the best way to plan you know, get, get in tune with some sort of editorial calendar, there's so many out there to so many to use, while you while you are creating this content, should you do it all?

Or can you take a weekend and do it all, let's say if you are focusing on one thing, if you're focusing on maybe your LinkedIn and you want to, you want to put some videos out, maybe you want to put a video out, or two videos out per week, so that's eight videos a month that you want to make all those eight videos, granted, you know, you want them to be short, maybe two minutes in time, do you want to make all of those on the weekend, so you can you know, batch batch them.

So you won't do them every day. And they'll take more time, but they'll take less time if you batch produce them. So just, you know, planning in terms of that, and having some sort of editorial calendar, you know, to publish that content is key as well. social listening, social listening and engagement. That's one thing you should always want to do. You know, it's, like I said, it's why they call it social media, you should always want to listen, and see what these different communities are talking about. A

nd, you know, you can implement some of that with within the one that you're trying to build. Also, it's always good to make sure that, you know that communication is there, because it's gonna be it's gonna be so useful, you'll you'll see exactly what people want. The thing that Buffett talks about, and I've spoken about this several times, which are analytics years, they're always there for different social media platforms, they have analytics.

So it's gonna give you information on where people are coming from, with in terms of your content, you know, what country they're coming from, and a whole lot of other in depth information that can be useful for you. So analytics is huge. I don't care if it's social media, I don't care. If you're blogging, if you have a podcast, any of that stuff, you want to know where people are coming from, you want to know what devices are they are they using? So you know, you want to make sure that you make content around that.

And that's why analytics are so important. And then of course with social media marketing, advertising, you know, with with advertising As in, you know, you have to understand platforms such as, even though Google itself is not a social media platform, but I kind of group them in there as well, because their ad platform with Google AdWords, their ad platform is the same ad platform that YouTube uses with their Instagram ads, you should always, you should always want to understand advertising on these different platforms.

The same is with Meta or with Should I start calling a meta now, or should I just keep calling on Facebook, we're gonna say Facebook until otherwise, until that whole meta thing is implemented. Facebook, their pay per click platform, they use, you know, they own Instagram. And it's the same thing using Instagram. Also, and even with that with it, pay per view, you want to see not just what to you, here's what you want to do more than anything, you want to do A/B testing, I don't care which platform to use it, you want to do A/B testing.

So you want to make sure you have the budget for it. First of all, and you want to make sure that have a couple of different ads, so you can know what works, and what isn't working, you know, is his this one ad, is it performing better? You know, is a performing better than B or vice versa? You know, why is it performing this way or that way? Facebook, Instagram, then you want to figure out how you want to run them in terms of am I running ads in the feed? Am I gonna run story ads?

Am I gonna run ads in the Facebook marketplace, and so on and so forth, you have to really, really hone in, on what's working, where you know, the people that you're trying to, you know, build a community or sell those products and services are, give away your free ebook or your free mini course, or what have you, you want to make sure that you are testing like a son of a gun. So make sure you cover all that as well. But just like anything else, um, you know, make sure that you hone in on your competitors, see what they're doing on their social accounts, see, you know, are they using Facebook?

Are they using Instagram, Tiktok, any of that stuff, see what they're doing, you know, you don't have to reinvent the wheel at all, see what they're doing and see if you can do the same thing with a unique twist. Because I'm sure that's exactly what they did, likely. So a lot of these people that, you know, we may look up to, you know, if they, you know, if they haven't spent a whole bunch of money, which a lot of them have, and they just produce a lot of original content, they've gotten a lot of their ideas from other people, and so on and so forth. They just put their own spin to it. And that's what I think anyone should do. And that's about it.

So make sure that you keep the discussion going at DigitalMarketingCreators.com/group is our private Facebook group. Also, make sure you subscribe. Also, make sure you subscribe. And if you can be kinda leave an honest review as well. We don't care what type of review of course we want a five star review. But, you know, if we don't deserve a five star review, just leave us a review.

And so we can actually make sure this podcast gets better and better and get shown to more people as well. And the show notes for this episode will be at DigitalMarketingCreators.com/episode15. We're already on number 15. So thanks for listening. And in our next episode, we'll discuss the benefits of social media marketing, so make sure you subscribe. Stay tuned. We'll see in the next episode. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to the Digital Marketing Creators Podcast at www.digitalmarketingcreators.com.