Social Media Marketing

In Chapter 3 of Essentials of Social Media Marketing, the strategies for social media advertising are given. 

Step 1: Identify a target audience and create personas. This step is important to the process of marketing your brand. If your brand is specific to a certain group of people, your target audience, this will become a persona. The chapter states that a target audience should consist of 3-5 different personas. I do not believe that this many are needed. A brand may only be focusing on 1-2 different groups of people, not necessarily 3-5. 

Step 2: Audit. When creating a social media market, the best thing to do is audit first. Make sure all of the content being produced is appropriate for the purpose. I went through to audit my accounts, but nothing of mine stuck out as important enough to delete or edit. 

Step 3: Establish goals. This is one of the steps that I believe is not the most important, at least at the start of marketing a brand. I do not think putting a number goal on something establishes its importance or achievement. When starting to market, there most likely will not be enough 'numbers' to consider important anyway. 

Step 4: Determine resources, roles, and responsibilities. This step is also not one of the most important in my opinion. I do not believe that having a bunch of personnel resources and budgets is too concerning when starting out. There does not need to be a big crew to get a message across on social media. 

Step 5: Establish a tone of voice. This one is an important step in the process, creating a tone that affects the way the audience views the brand. It goes hand in hand with finding a target audience. The example of the way Wendy's tweets on Twitter to other fast-food chains is very entertaining. It goes well with the audience of younger people who enjoy sarcasm and humor. From their tone of voice, that is exactly the kind of audience they attract. 

Step 6: Select a platform. This step is very important to advertising because different platforms are used by different groups of people. Facebook is mostly for older generations of people, while Instagram is mostly for younger generations. Different audiences are better marketed to through certain platforms. 

Step 7: Create and optimize networks. This step is basically just making sure all parts of the platform chosen are filled out in their entirety regarding the 'about me' section. This will help the audience get to know who is marketing the brand and how credible they are. This step is important, but not too difficult. 

Step 8 & 9: Create a distribution and content strategy and create a calendar. This step entails that making a schedule is important. I do not completely agree with this step. There does not have to be a set number of posts someone makes a day or week. The more important thing is that they update with useful information to keep the audience engaged. This does not have to be a continuous train of 50 posts a day. When that is done, the audience gets drowned in notifications and they are not always useful. 

Step 10: Track, analyze, and tune. Tracking progress is good, but it does not have to be as difficult as the chapter makes it seem. Keeping up to date on how posts are doing is good. Stressing over the numbers and charts is not necessarily the best way to do this.