A Comprehensive Guide to Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Learn A2Z about social media marketing in this article. Learn why SMM is important in 2025, the latest statistics, and a step-by-step guide to start social media marketing for individuals and businesses.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Marketing is promoting brands and individuals on social media platforms through engaging content, a platform-specific engagement routine, and paid advertising campaigns.
SMM helps brands create brand awareness and gain loyal followers who are interested in the brand’s services and products. Social media helps organizations generate quality leads, and build a loyal community in the long run.
Notably, social media is a young branding method and attracts today's decision-makers. Brands must become energetic and younger versions of themselves to share the same energy on SMM platforms.
Why is Social Media Marketing Important in 2025?
Traditional marketing methods are great but the advertising landscape has layers now. Today’s decision-makers don’t only want to see flashy ads anymore. Instead, they look for authentic connections with the brand. They want brands to be relatable or inspirational but they want them to be authentic at best.
Social media gives this opportunity to the audience. With creative platforms such as YouTube and Instagram, audiences today want brands to share themselves as more than just a company. Audiences expect them to be authentic and with a personality. Brands need to showcase their values, vision, mission, process, benefits to audiences, customer experiences, achievements, and memorable moments within the organization.
This keeps the audience engaged and increases their trust in brands, compelling them to purchase from the organizations. Though building a brand takes time, the returns in the long run are very promising. Social media builds a closely connected audience that stays loyal and purchases repeatedly from the same brand.
Moreover, Social media marketing leads audiences through all the stages of a sales funnel, giving them enough time and reasons to trust and buy.
Here is a typical understanding of a Social Media Funnel:
Name of Funnel Stage
Stage Nature
Content Type
Top of the Funnel
Awareness stage
Brand videos, blog posts, infographics, paid ads
Middle of the Funnel
Trust stage
Case studies, product comparisons, webinars
Bottom of the Funnel
Conversion Stage
Demos, limited-time offers, buying guides
Benefits of Social Media Marketing:
- Increases brand awareness among audiences and lets brands connect with them directly.
- Helps brands become more user-centric and communicate with today’s decision-makers.
- Guides organizations in learning about customer feedback and improving their experiences.
- Learn about customer insights and behaviour.
- Build a community that gives sustainability to the organization in the long run.
Latest Statistics in Social Media Marketing:
Social media has become a major marketplace for businesses. Here are some stats that prove this.
- 56.1% of social media users buy a product online weekly.
- 90% of users on social media follow at least one brand.
- 74% of consumers follow social media guidance for their purchases.
- 98% of small businesses use social media to grow.
- 76% of professionals say that social media helps them grow their website traffic.
- Global social media ad spending is expected to touch the US$433.60 billion mark by 2030.
Top Social Media Platforms (Monthly Active Users) to Start SMM in 2025
- Facebook: 3.0 Billion
- Instagram: 2 Billion
- LinkedIn: 310 Million
- YouTube: 2.5 Billion
- X (Formerly known as Twitter): 600 Million
- Pinterest: 450 Million
- WhatsApp: 2 Billion
- Threads: 200 Million
Step into the Social Media Community Marketing
Today’s internet era has given birth to a new kind of marketing that uses community as its power pillar. Communities are loyal consumer bases that repeatedly purchase from the same brand.
There are thousands of brands out there offering good-quality products to their audience. So why will people buy from you? This obvious question has one simple answer - Today’s market is not only about products or brands. It’s about people who relate to the brand.
Brands today need to create communities and a loyal consumer base over the years. This provides them with recurring income and people who stand on the company’s behalf. To an extent, communities promote a brand’s product through word of mouth which itself becomes a testimony for new audiences.
Core Elements of Social Media Management Strategy
Let’s discuss the pillars of social media marketing that brands must focus on.
- Content strategy
- Content quality
- Engagement
- Analytics
- Advertising
Choose the Right Social Media Platform
Businesses don’t need to focus on all social media platforms for promoting their brands. Instead, they should choose 1-2 platforms and create a strategy for those. But how can brands choose the right platform at first? Here are a few tips to do so.
- Find the ideal consumer persona for the brand.
- Examine where the target audience is most active.
- Set the short-term and long-term goals.
- Evaluate your resources such as time, effort, and investment.
- Do an in-detailed competitor analysis.
- See the trends and follow them.
Questions to Ask Before Starting Social Media Marketing
1. What are the short-term and long-term goals of your social media campaigns?
Short-term goals can be increasing views, impressions, engagement, website traffic, followers etc. While long term goals can be fostering meaningful relationships with consumers, establishing brand authority etc.
2. Who are your target audiences?
Find the best suited consumers for your services or products. They can be students, housewives, working women, young girls, pregnant women, retired people etc.
3. How do we maintain consistency on all social media platforms?
Establish consistent brand presentation and guidelines for all platforms. These guidelines should be about voice tone, color, imagery etc.
4. What is the right content that captivates the audience?
There’s no fixed formula of right content. It changes over time but the core always stays the same for all time. You need to create content that is highly relevant to your audience, address their pain point, and is presented in an engaging format.
5. How to track and analyze social media performance?
Social media platforms have their dedicated analytical tools. Use them to monitor your insights, website followers, engagement, reach, audience group, etc. However, there are some dedicated tools available for more complex social media analysis.
Step-by-Step Guide to Start Social Media Marketing
- Find the right audience.
- Set the goals.
- Choose the right platforms.
- Explore the platforms to know how they work.
- Do a competitor analysis.
- Find the USPs of the brand and use them as the core pillar for personalised content.
- Create a 1-month content strategy fulfilling the three stages of a social media funnel. (Top of the Funnel, Middle of the Funnel, and Bottom of the Funnel)
- Create social media profiles.
- Create good-quality visuals, texts, and value-rich content.
- Start posting consistently and creating connections.
- Develop a proper engagement strategy and follow that holistically.
- Track the performance analytics.
- Run paid advertising campaigns to boost visibility.
Tools for Social Media Marketing
1. Analytics:
- Google Analytics
- Sprout Social
- Hootsuite
- Buffer
2. Graphic Design:
- Canva
- Adobe Photoshop
- Adobe spark
- Visme
- Crello
3. Video Editing:
- Adobe Premiere Pro
- Final Cut Pro
- Filmora
- InShot
4. SEO:
- SEMrush
- Ahrefs
- Moz Pro
- Yoast SEO
- Google Search Console
5. Social Media Management Tools:
- Hootsuite
- Buffer
- Sprout Social
- Agropulse
- Zoho Social
Conclusion
This article shared a brief guide on social media marketing. It discussed what social media marketing is, how it works, why this is important in 2025, statistics about social media, and how brands can plan a social media strategy to grow their business.
The step-by-step guide is a direct action plan for individuals and organizations alike. However, their approach may differ in connecting with their targeted audience. Also, it shared some of the most famous tools for social media marketing that can help in creating content, connecting with audiences, and running a successful SMM campaign.
Are you looking for an expert social media marketing service agency for your business?
Connect to Vigyapan Mart social media experts today.
