Social media marketing, content, and value creation

The term “Social Media” (SM) is no longer a foreign concept to most of us, especially the younger generation who has practically grown up with it. Despite its original purpose of sharing, socialising, and building relationships between people, social media has been widely used by businesses as a marketing strategy.

So What is Social Media Marketing (SMM)?

SMM is the use of social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to increase brand awareness, increase sales, and providing a better customer service. In fact, as April 2021, there are 4.33 billion people are actively on social media (Kemp 2021), with more than half of population in earth are active on social media platforms has allow businesses with the opportunity to use social media to communicate with and build a better customer relationship.

Furthermore, SMM has become an effective and powerful method of influencing customer’s purchase intention and brand loyalty by featuring or collaborating with Instagram influencers or celebrities to endorse the product (Laksamana 2018).

Is SMM always an effective tool?

Although social media marketing is popular, it is ineffective if not well planned; therefore, marketers must be creative in creating content and aware of the value that they want to convey to their customers.

In fact, content is not created to promote a product, rather, it is a branding method that allows its target audiences to be attracted, involved, and familiar with the brand (Plessis 2017). Some creative social media content ideas include hosting a giveaway event, hosting a Q&A session, going behind the scenes, and many more. With interesting, unique, and appealing content, it can capture the customer’s attention and make them aware of the brand.

Another reason to use social media as a marketing strategy is to develop, maintain, and establish relationships between the brand and the customer. It is only possible if both parties have faith in each other. Therefore, the content being created must have value as it gives the customer an idea or impression of the brand identity and the product that being promoted.

Limitation of SMM

However, there are some drawbacks to using SMM that should be considered, such as negative comments that can harm a brand’s reputation, the possibility of customer privacy information leakage and hacking, and it is time-consuming because it requires constant online engagement.