Social Media Books

You might be using ‘social media’ every day, but are you maximizing its potential to best benefit your business? Understanding the implications of using social media strategically to enhance and complement marketing initiatives at work is crucial for unlocking your business’s growth.

Smart Social Media is grounded in the insights gained from hands-on consultancy work, plus hours of personal research, observations and in-depth reviews of the platforms themselves. Both practical and informative, Smart Social Media is full of actionable insights and valuable guidance that will emphasize the importance of using social media strategically, to enhance brand awareness, boost engagement, build relationships with your customers, and keep up with ever-changing
consumer behaviour.

Contents

• Chapter 1: Principles for effective social media marketing
• Chapter 2: Getting to know your customers
• Chapter 3: Planning your business growth
• Chapter 4: The importance of branding
• Chapter 5: Guiding the buyer’s journey with social media content
• Chapter 6: Unlocking opportunities through collaborations and partnerships
• Chapter 7: The power of community for business growth
• Chapter 8: Success stories

Introduction

I’m imagining that you’ve picked up this book because you want to do more. You’re ambitious. You want to grow (and there’s many ways to do that). I understand that completely; I consider myself to be a lifelong learner, an avid reader and a constant list writer.

Aristotle famously wrote, ‘The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.’ When you’re a business owner, and a marketer, it feels like the increasing pace of change in the world around you make this an even bigger challenge. I’m not promising all the answers, but I hope by sharing my own learnings, you will not feel so alone. Or overwhelmed. By reading this book, I hope you will feel encouraged and inspired.

When I was approached by the team at Bloomsbury Business to write Smart Social Media, I was midway through writing Planning for Success: A practical guide to setting and achieving your social media marketing goals (published October 2023), aimed at supporting early career marketers entering the world of work. In collaboration with Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, I carried out quantitative and qualitative research with marketers working in SME businesses in the UK to understand better the industry observations I have built from years of marketing consultancy and delivering social media training. The research findings indicated that a significant proportion of marketers were unsure how best to use social media in a business setting, were unsure how to measure success, and had received little training on using social media in the previous year.

However, new graduates and those in their first marketing role weren’t the only ones who were struggling with social media in a business setting. The research indicated that those with several years’ experience also experienced a lack of confidence about how to use social media effectively in business, and how to prove its efficacy to the board to secure support and further investment. What persisted was a sense of all parties ‘not knowing what they didn’t know’, and often being misled by vanity metrics and myths of social media as a dark art. I continue to address those concerns in this book. Smart Social Media is aimed at individuals who are responsible for social media marketing in their business, and who find themselves asking what they might be missing. What more could they be doing? How could they be using metrics more effectively? How could they best partner with influencers to grow the business? It is for those who are both involved in strategic planning as well as the tactical implementation of social media marketing.

If you are reading this book, I assume you are familiar with using social media and the language associated with it. It is not a media channel you can expect to use successfully if you are not part of the ecosystem, watching and learning from your own personal experiences.

The terms customers, consumers, target audience and prospects may be used interchangeably to refer to individuals or groups engaging with the purchase of products or services. Throughout the book, I have used the term ‘business’. I believe the content of the book is applicable to both B2C (Business-to-Consumer) and B2B (Business-to-Business) contexts, and also for those working in not-for-profit organizations or educational institutions. It may also be used interchangeably with ‘brand’ when discussing businesses with diverse activities and product lines. I have tried to use varied examples and case studies throughout, and to share evergreen principles to guide and inform how you use social media, whatever sector you are working in, and however much the platforms themselves change.

As we witness the integration of artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR) into social media platforms, I believe the future of social media marketing holds even more exciting opportunities for businesses. Those willing to embrace innovation and adapt to the dynamic shifts in consumer behaviours and emerging trends can achieve sustainable growth, whether that’s through market or product development, operational efficiencies, physical presence (locations) and employee headcounts or other relevant criteria.