How to Be a Pro-Social Media Marketer

Be A Pro-Social Media Marketer

Written by Jasmeet Singh

Jasmeet is an Entrepreneur, Avid Reader, Startup Consultant, and a Reluctant Blogger at Lessons At Startup. A regular family guy and a proud father of two adorable kids.

August 26, 2019

Social media marketing; the concept, the practice, the methodology, is the thing of the hour. Clearly, the inevitable!

It’s incredible how social media has come a long way in the last few years. It’s impossible to imagine life without social media now. From sharing personal posts to offering a product or service, it means different things to different people.

Imagine a world without social media. Think about how you can survive without your favorite social media platform for a day.

Sounds difficult. Right?

Consider this – An average internet user daily spends roughly 2 hours and 22 minutes on social media. Out of the 2.2 hours, around1 hour is spent on facebook, and the rest of the time is divided between different social media platforms (source:

Social media is not a platform we go to every day to pass our time. It is a part of our life. An indispensable part of life, without which life is incomplete.

When someone asks me “How to become a social media marketer in 2019?”. My first reaction is “Aren’t we all already social media marketers?”

Have you ever thought “When I share a post about a brand, am I promoting it?” “When I write a review of a product/service, am I not promoting the service?”.

So, aren’t we all social media marketers already who are an active part of the social media marketing cycle?

In my personal opinion (which is subjected to debate) we are already “unintentional social media marketers” helping brands promote their products.

But before we begin with “are, we or are we not?”, and how to become a social media marketer?

Let’s go back a few steps and look at – what is social media marketing?

As per Wikipedia, Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service.

Let’s dig it deeper – It means the way we promote ourselves, putting our best foot forward, on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn to help our fanfare or to look for opportunities; we can also promote our businesses on the same platforms, leveraging the power of content, to elevate our customer base.

But what does a social media marketer do? Is the pertinent question every newbie in social media marketing asks me?

How to be a Social media marketer? And for that matter a successful one.

Well, let’s first revisit the process of marketing to understand how this age-old process applies aptly to social media marketing.

Let’s put some marketing in social media to formulate steps which will help you be a good social media marketer.

A pro-social media marketer in this era is the one who still knows the fundamentals of marketing and applies them aptly to social media platforms.

Elaborating what I wrote above – My studies taught me some fundamentals of Marketing (I have applied them invariably to all the new methods of marketing for years). Here they are:

  1. Market Analysis
  2. Identify Target Segment
  3. Marketing Strategy/ Marketing Mix
  4. Marketing Management

Market Analysis

Identify, analyze, and interpret all social media platforms, i.e., number of platforms, reach of these platforms, demographics of the users. 

Evaluate each platform individually to check its potential in terms of your product or service. And design your content creation strategy for them.

Example: Is Facebook the right platform for promoting clothing brand?

Would it be ok to publish job-related content on LinkedIn? Shall I put this video on Pinterest or Instagram or both?

It’s crucial to analyze all these social media platforms, instead of cluttering them with irrelevant content.

Identify Target Segment

One can’t be selling everything to everybody, it’s impossible! So, time to identify the people you want to address your marketing efforts to. 

The important demographics being; age, ethnicity, gender, income group, state/ city, etc.

It’s essential to listen to your target segment. 

What interests them?

What’s important to them?

What excites them?

Participate in discussions which interest them. Be a part of your target segment. Think like them to capture them.

Build a relationship with your target segment. 

Social media marketing is all about forming relations, being there for your prospective customer to give a timely response.

Marketing Strategy/ Marketing Mix

To develop a social media marketing strategy, it is vital to take into aspect the 4 -P’s of the marketing mix.

The Product, Price, place, and promotion (All thanks to Mr Mc Carthy J. whose concept of 4Ps of marketing still hold)

Having all P’s in sync with your media platforms and your target audience is essential. 

We can apply them to Digital Marketing and call them 4Ps of Digital Marketing.

How you place your product or service and on which platforms are you promoting, should all be in sync to achieve maximum growth instead of clutter.

Marketing Management:

Marketing Management is the action phase of the development of a marketing program in which a suitable marketing mix is a set of a target segment.

It’s essential to connect and build a relationship with others in social media.

If you provide useful information and they share your content on their walls, then you have found a vast new audience.

How to be successful in social media marketing?

A fool-proof process can take you a long way in building a sound social media strategy. Trust your instincts along the way, as you know your product the best. 

Share relevant and useful information. There is no shortcut to real, authentic content. You nail it, and you have got it.

Easier said than done, right?

Ever wondered about the evolution of social media marketing?

Technology has taken its own time to make social media so vast and so readily available. 

But how did it all begin? Where did we start? Did people really get the pioneer advantage? Wasn’t Orkut the only popular platform when we started? So, what is the current scenario like?

Let’s have a look:

Number one rule in every book is Facebook:

We live in a world where Facebook alone has 1.65 billion active monthly users. There is something for everyone on Facebook. 

The chance to keep in touch with your peers, the user-friendly design for everybody, the icing on the cake being it is free. But wait, wasn’t orkut all of this already? What went wrong?

The widespread belief is that Orkut lacked focus, wasn’t as user-friendly as one needed an invite to join Orkut. 

Also, their inability to scale, with lack of privacy, was a turnoff for most people. And by the end of it all, Facebook was everywhere. Better and stronger!

There are no Facebook marketing secrets to succeed on Facebook. All you have to do is, produce engaging content from time to time.

 There is no in without LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the most utilized B2B platform in the world. It’s the most widely accepted no-nonsense social media channel among businesses. 

The platform boasts of 200 million users worldwide. It’s easy for the brands to communicate and promote awareness, for job seekers to build relations and seek opportunities. Accessible and relevant to build a network.

Using LinkedIn for marketing has become essential for every B2B Organization. No Business can ignore the biggest B2B Social network on the internet.

 Content, content, content!

Just like my 2-year old says ‘Hurray” Every time she is pleased, we say ‘Hurray’ when we see enjoyable content. i.e. your target segment seeks content. 

Why content valuable in Digital marketing is something that cannot be emphasized enough. 

To put it in layman language – Content is the only medium to communicate with your target audience.

Creating a story around your brand is essential. One must talk, you can’t keep mum in this new digital age. Just selling is not enough anymore, you should talk, talk about your experiences, your product, your customers, your story, and your processes. 

Create information which people are willing to spend time reading.

The good thing is, we have access to a lot of information regarding customer preferences, their spending habits, and their interests. It couldn’t make more sense to create the best content to connect with your audience.

Stay updated and keep things live

Twitter is doing a great job of keeping things up to date. Live videos are a thing with Facebook and snap chat. Visuals have picked up the pace in the last 1-2 years.

So, even if you thought that some of us got the pioneers advantage, you need to rethink. In this continually evolving, ever-changing industry, it’s difficult to always remain at a position. 

You have to keep yourself continuously updated to enjoy the ongoing advantage.

Think Ahead of Times

We can never be too futuristic. There are talks of Facebook launching facebook360 already. 

It’s about camera capturing things in real-time. The virtual reality! It’s about creating a new experience visually.

Like we moved from 2D to 3D to 4D in movies, we will move from Facebook to Facebook 360 someday.

The key is to think ahead of times. Everybody is curious about new, about the latest, that is how we stay in’!

It took a decade for the social media industry to evolve from Orkut to Facebook, from SMS to WhatsApp messages, from images to videos.

All it takes is revolutionary thinking! Think ahead of times, post relevant content, and keep your user base as engaged as possible. No one has the pioneer advantage here for too long, as trends catch up pretty quickly and within no time everybody catches up.

So, to sustain, keep producing relevant, user-friendly content.

That is the key to be a successful social media marketer. And you don’t have to know social media marketing only to be a successful social media marketer.

 The growth of social media has led to some careers requiring social media marketing as a “must” skill set.

One of them is marketing. Marketing professional in today’s era should know social media marketing in some form or the other.

It might not be a full-fledged career for them, but it is an add-on skill which they cannot do without.

They must know “how to use social media in marketing” and “how to generate leads through social media” to help their offline efforts in generating leads.

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