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Marketing is a way of communication between a business and potential customers for presentation and promoting values of a certain product or services. The main goal of marketing is to sell, determining the target audience, conducting analysis of the market, consumers’ behaviours and customer’s relationship etc.

Social media marketing is used to present a business through social media and use this as a way to communicate a message to the potential customers. Social media marketing is to take advantage of the benefit of social network in order to realize some of the marketing goals such as promotion and establishing relationship with customers etc.

Types of Social Media

Collaborative projects- These are online magazines, Wikipedia, questions and answers platforms.

Blogs and microblogs- Examples are Twitter and Tumblr. Contents are shared in short forms or long blog articles. Twitter is differentiated by its microblogging from sending short messages called tweets. It uses hashtags.

Content Communities- Contents are shared after which users can interact by sharing impressions about the content. Examples of these are Youtube and Vimeo. These websites host video files. Videos can be promotional, instructional or you can start a video blog. You can promote video by sharing link on other social channels.

Social Networking websites- They include Facebook and Google+. Facebook is seen as the most popular social network and also a network with largest amount of potential customers. Facebook pages are for celebrities, businesses and institutions. On the other hand Google+ uses Google+ profiles for individuals, Google+ pages are for companies and institutions.

Virtual Gameworld- Example of this is World of Warcraft where people are engaged in games.

Virtual Social World- Game-like design allows users to create virtual identity and interact with other users through online platform.

Mobile Social Media: Mobile users accessing the internet has surpassed desktop users. When working on social media marketing, mobile users need to be considered ad optimization of content for mobile devices too. The social media has over the years been regarded as an important source of information and news. An important tool in various global events starting from music competitions, sports events to political elections and campaigns.

Social media Engagement: This refers to the possibility of users taking part in a certain activity such as liking, commenting, clicking or sharing as a result of your engagement. You can increase the level of social media engagement by:

 Choosing the perfect timing that your followers are online.

 Address to your target audience.

 Contents should be genuine.

Social media and target audience: Target audience are the group of potential customers you want to reach via social media. You can use social media insights to learn of target audience. Facebook and Google+ offer this services.

Sharing contents on Social media: Content marketing means creating content for promotional purposes such as contents like blog articles, images, e-book etc. These can be shared on social media accounts to engage users and increase traffic. High quality content and photos should be posted. Graphics should be in charts or text, videos can be review video, tutorial, entertaining and chat sessions.

Approach to social media: your approach to social media depends largely on the type of business as well as goals you want to achieve, but then you need to:

 Be professional

 Be reliable

 Be consistent

 Be generous

 Be inspirational

 Be interesting

 Be social

 Be helpful

 Be able to combine different approaches.