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The Debate: Social Media Marketing vs. Social Media Advertising?
Billions of people use social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest. These billions of people represent many active and prospective customers for your brand. Attracting these customers to your web assets can be complicated and time consuming, especially if you don’t know what options are available to you and your budget. Social media advertising, engagement and marketing are three strategies you can use to generate qualified leads and to achieve your branding goals.
The question: Social media marketing or social media advertising?
Social media advertising is the planning and buying of display ads on social websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. These ads are targeted to specific users, yet they are passive in nature because people aren’t actively looking for the information/service that a brand is providing.
Social media engagement is comprised of content-rich social media postings, followed by in-depth and timely discussion/interaction with the followers of individual advertiser social media assets (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.).
Social media marketing is the use of both social media advertising and social media engagement to promote a brand’s product or service. Social media marketing has both paid and non-paid components that complement each other — guiding prospective customers through a brand’s story. Integrating paid social media advertising and a rich social engagement plan as part of your social media marketing strategy will provide valuable benefits and a high return on investment for both your lead generation and branding goals. What can you gain from deploying a social media marketing campaign?
· Large market visibility
· Active monitoring of brand equity
· Ability to dissuade negative brand sentiment at the point of conversation
· The ability to communicate various and changing value propositions to consumers at different times of the decision-making cycle
· Data collection and analysis that drives marketing optimization
Advertisers must consider two important variables when it comes to a social media campaign prior to planning, deploying, measuring and optimizing their campaigns. These two variables are:
· Media budget: how much money an advertiser has to spend on promotional activities such as display ad inventory or original content development
· Tactical resources budget: how much time (billable hours) will be needed to complete the marketing work
Let’s look at some scenarios
A high media budget and a low tactical budget: Launch a social media advertising campaign. Why? A social media advertising campaign requires fewer tactical hours. The most time-consuming part of a social media advertising campaign is the development of creative and the planning/execution of the social ad buy. A social media advertising campaign is valuable for lead-generation initiatives.
No media budget but heavy tactical capabilities and/or in-house resources: This scenario lends itself to the execution of a social media engagement campaign. A social media engagement campaign is a “budget free” campaign that incorporates content development, social discussion, social engagement, social monitoring, social media optimization, and social and data analysis. This type of campaign will be much more valuable for awareness and brand engagement.
A low-to-mid-range media budget and a low-to-mid-range tactical budget: Launch a hybrid social media marketing campaign. Why? A hybrid social campaign is comprised of:
· Lower-budget advertising (social media advertising used in this case as a function of social media marketing) that still maintains awareness/traffic levels
· Content research and generation
· Social discussion
· Social monitoring
· Social media optimization
· Social and data analysis
This hybrid media mix will help you attain both lead generation and awareness goals for your brand.
Annodyne’s advice
Annodyne recommends implementing a social media campaign as part of your product marketing. Whether it is social display advertising, a unique engagement campaign, or a highly recognizable social media marketing campaign, it takes an experienced mix of PPC, SEO, social media and data analysis to research, design and deploy an innovative social media marketing campaign that changes the conversation. The work never stops there, though. A thorough analysis of granular data across all channels and the ability to make adjustments to strategy and tactics will ensure your social media marketing campaign results in high return on investment.
Source: annodyne.com
social media is defined as the online communication platforms used to connect individuals to one or many others. Social media marketing involves implementing marketing messages into conversations occurring on social platforms that are relevant to the conversation. In traditional marketing, messages are sporadically projected to a targeted audience. When marketing takes place on social media platforms, it adds to the conversations of a community. Does that suggest that paid media ads on social media are not in fact social media marketing? You be the judge.
Your social media marketing goals don’t have to be based on numbers, but they should correlate to a business initiative. Spreading the word about your business, awareness about a promotion, or providing great customer service, are a few of the many goals you can achieve through social media marketing.
Good day,
Whenever anyone talks about the difference between Marketing, Sales, Advertising, PR, CSR, Trade Marketing, Digital Marketing etc..
Just remember, that Marketing is the "umbrella", and it covers "all other formats".
Their are tiers that can be overlapping each other below it, or some may also be the parent to the other child formats. But in totality, Marketing is always at their top.
The details provided by Abeer AlSayed are correct and I agree to the article she posted here for your reference.
Thanks a bunch
Fo'ad Shams
Advertisement is one of the method of marketing. That means- Social media Marketing is broader term as compared to social media advertisement
Social media marketing can be done by many ways like - making a video in YouTube or creating a page in Facebook. Whereas, for advertisement you have to give money to Facebook or YouTube to put your advertisement in their site.
