Social media marketing (SMM) is a part of online marketing and involves the strategic planning and operational use of social media to achieve marketing goals. A key aspect of SMM is user interaction with advertising content and formats. Often, viral marketing—where a brand's marketing messages spread through user sharing within their personal social groups—is closely associated with SMM. Social media includes well-known networks like Facebook and Twitter as well as lesser-known, niche communities.

Special features of social media marketing

• Social Listening/Monitoring: At the start of every successful social media strategy is the systematic analysis of the target audience. A central component of this social monitoring is listening on the internet—known as social listening. This involves tracking all relevant social media platforms and collecting and analyzing relevant comments or mentions in blogs, forums, and news sites on the internet.

• Targeted Advertising "Just in Time": With comprehensive knowledge of user behavior and interactions, it is theoretically possible to actively influence trends in social media during their emergence with social media management. To do this, a company monitors its target audience on social media and analyzes their desires, needs, and sentiments (social monitoring). The company then develops (almost) real-time content and services that match the target audience. To manage the associated rapid marketing processes within the company, the use of agile methods from product management in marketing (agile marketing) is extremely advantageous.
  
  

What social networks are there? What distinguishes them?

• Facebook: The largest social network currently is Facebook—with over 1.5 billion users worldwide. The design and structure of this platform actively encourage users to share their interests and preferences publicly. This provides a massive data base for advertisers. In particular, Facebook Ads can be very precisely targeted to specific audiences.

• Twitter: The microblogging service Twitter allows users to label messages ("tweets") with 140 characters using #hashtags and spread them across the Twitter network. Search queries with hashtags provide users with all messages related to that hashtag. For example, searching for #InboundMarketing will show all tweets with that hashtag directly after they are published in your stream of messages. Twitter has proven to be an ideal network for viral campaigns, where content is quickly shared and spread among users with high relevance and resonance.

• Xing: Xing is a German social network for professional contacts of all kinds. The platform, founded in 2003 (formerly OpenBC), has about 10 million users in the German-speaking region. Xing started as a contact platform between individual users and has evolved into a universal meeting and recruitment platform for middle management. Social interactions are built not only between individual participants but also through numerous user groups/communities that provide targeted access to topics and interested user circles.
• LinkedIn: The international counterpart to Xing is LinkedIn. However, LinkedIn places a strong emphasis on spreading social content through its users to enhance their own social status (social proof). As with a Facebook stream, users receive posted content from their own network and can "like" and share these messages and content offerings. LinkedIn offers excellent opportunities to position oneself as a thought leader and industry expert in B2B marketing. This potential has been recognized by LinkedIn, which actively promotes the topic of thought leadership on its platform.
  
  

How high is the benefit of social media for businesses?

Social networks are used to establish a social, personal relationship with customers. On social media, you can greatly emotionalize messages, even if your company otherwise sells few emotions. For example, use images to introduce your team, your production process, or your company. People are naturally curious and like to get a behind-the-scenes look.

How much time should I allocate for my social media marketing each week?

Social media management means real-time marketing. Timing is everything. A few hours per week is not enough. You need to be well-informed not only about your products but also about current events to conduct effective social media marketing—especially on Facebook.

How long does it take to see initial results?

Engagement on social media is a process that takes time. Only after publishing content for a while and gaining user interest in that content can visible results be achieved.

For which businesses is social media marketing relevant?

In principle, every business should engage with social media. It is important to determine how your target audience uses social media and whether the content or services you offer are being discussed there. You should search for keywords related to your offerings and actively participate in discussions about these keywords.

If it turns out that your content is being discussed on social media, you will need to decide whether you want to join the conversation and actively engage in social media marketing.

The following questions can help with this assessment:

• Is your offering frequently discussed?
• Can and do you want to influence these discussions with your information?
• Does your content offering stand out from that of your competitors?
• Can you acquire new customers or retain existing ones through dialogue on social media?