You must have heard of this term, “Social Media”. It’s a term that has picked up quite fast in Uganda and now all over the air Kampala. It’s been around for some time, it’s just didn’t make it to people’s minds fast.

A number of times, I have seen people relate to Social Media as equal to Facebook. While Facebook is definitely a huge part of social media nowadays, it definitely is not all social media. Social media is all the platforms centered around networking communities online, web, or application-based.

In this article, we’ll look at exactly that, and the various ways it can be implemented, to increase growth in your business. These are the fundamentals of social media marketing, I believe everyone in business should know.

AD – Just before we get our hands dirty;

SocialClark recently launched an Affordable Social media package for small businesses in Uganda going for as low as UGX 95K per month, and boosting on Facebook and Instagram also goes for as low at 20K per month.

So, if you’re a business owner looking to spend as low as possible, but get professional work, do give them a call via 0707 444 474 or just visit: SocialClark.com

So, what exactly is, Social media marketing? And how can you grow your influence or Business with it?

It simply stands for the use of social media platforms to promote/Advertise a Product, service or brand.

Examples of social media platforms include: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, Whatsapp, etc

This form of Internet Marketing has various ways of advertising. We’ll take a look at a few and the simple logic behind each.

Influencer Marketing In Uganda

This is typically a version of social media marketing, where you entrust your brand, product or service, to already famous/known people, to promote on the different social media platforms they have online.

This is not a very common practice in Kampala, and definitely not in the other parts of Uganda. An example of this in action, is Africell’s campaign of Africell Internet bundles, launched in 2017. Africell in this campaign uses famous Musicians like Sheebah Karungi, Bebe Cool and Social media giants like Sheila Gashumba.

The idea is simple. When you get an influencer to share your product or service, You automatically tap into their audience (the people that follow your influencer), and depending on how relevant your product, service or brand is to them, you stand a chance to sale to them, just because an influencer(s) shared what you give them to share.

Influencer Marketing in A Use-case/Example;

We’ll use a fictional Ugandan Tourism company called “Visit Africa Tours and Travel”.

Imagine we had a tour coming up next month and we wanted to promote it using influencer marketing.
So, let’s find a well-positioned influencer/person. We can also choose to have more than just one.

We’ll talk to the influencer(s) about what we want to be advertised, then they make a post(s) on their social media pages with the primary intent of bringing their followers to buy our Tour Package coming up next month.

The end result, Our influencers will post/share about it, and like that, we make sales off of our influencer’s followers (Caution: Not that it always works).

Organic Marketing.

You will hear this in several ways, Organic reach, Un-paid reach, Sometimes Organic traffic.
It’s the kind of internet media marketing that doesn’t involve payments to social media platforms for your advertising.

This is the most common form of Social Media advertising in Uganda today. Even though most businesses don’t realize or even care to, they use it. This is mostly in Kampala (only because there is more activity here), but also significantly rising in the other parts like Mbarara, Soroti, Kabale etc.

In this kind of Social media Marketing, you will create posts/campaigns of your brand, products or services, publish them to social media platforms you choose, and be satisfied with the reach you get however big, or  small.
Reach means the number of people that see your posts/campaigns. There are several tactics of increasing your organic reach, the most effective being cross-posting.

Organic Marketing Example/Use-case.

We go to our Facebook page, Make an image post of a group of Mountain Gorillas, add a small promotional text of next month’s tour date and price.
In the next 24 hours, this post will probably collect an average of 70 to about 90 views, 1 – 5 likes, 1 or 2 comment and maybe 1 share.

The above estimation is based on our page having 1,000 likes, and Facebook’s 7% organic reach. What this translates to is that a page will get about 6 – 7 people to view a single post for every 100 likes on the page. That is Facebook organic reach for you.

Cross-posting Example/Use-case

You can choose to share the post to your own Facebook timeline, which pushes the post to also about 7% of your friends, then share it to a relevant Facebook group, this should give you some more views depending on how big and active this group is, farther more, you can post or share this same post/advert to other social media platforms like twitter and Instagram.

To sum it all up, You have a single post, circulated on different levels of the different social media platforms you chose. This gives you much better organic reach than you could ever get by leaving it to facebook’s default organic reach of 7%.

PPC—Pay Per Click Advertising

Its the opposite of Organic marketing. but not exactly.

While organic marketing struggles to reach more people without spending money, PPC marketing is looking to get the best reach for its money. This is usually termed as “ROI—Return on Investment” which is basically a calculation of how much you get for how much you spent on PPC advertising.

Pay per click in general is a form of internet marketing where an advertiser pays money for each time an advert they placed on an internet platform is clicked.

Dependent on the kind of campaign you do with PPC, you should always know how much you are spending, on what exactly, and how much you are making back thereafter.

Now, not to say you shouldn’t go organic, but if you can afford it, I think this is the real deal. The honey port of social media marketing if I may call it.Yes there is work, actually, too much work is involved, but if you know what you are doing,  this is one of the best investments you can ever make in marketing your brand.

The moment you get to know exactly what you need to do, when and how you do it, PPC advertising has the power to turn your business into a great success than almost any other form of marketing on social media.

This form of Internet marketing usually has highly customizable target audiences, so advertisers can determine themselves who their adverts are served to. when and where. You can target adverts by age, geographical location, hobbies, previous website actions, etc.

PPC Advertising Example/use-case

Make the post/advert of next month’s tour date and pricing, just like in the previous tour company example, but this time, go ahead to boost that post through Facebook PPC.

Social Media Management.

This is mostly if not just about making posts and administering engagement on your business’ social media pages/presence.

Posting to your social media pages can be simplified using a social media management tool that enables you Post to all your social media pages and accounts at once. This will save you time especially when you have to post to several platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc.

Note that it is no more “management” when it’s you doing it, but it usually makes more sense when done by a 3rd Party on your behalf.

Social Media Management to differ from “Social Media Marketing” is more about keeping your social media presence alive, mostly organically (Without paying Facebook or any other social platform to boost or promote your posts/content/product).

Social Media Management Example/use case.

A corporate company that just wants to have a professional presence online, but is not really fired up with the idea of finding customers on the internet.

So they get an Internet Marketing Agency like Optibrave Digital, to monitor, make posts, engage and measure the performance of their Facebook page, on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

Alternatively, you can opt for an affordable service like SocialClark as mentioned at the start of this article, their Social media marketing starts at 170K per month and Social media content creation at 95K per month.

In Conclusion

As in the book this Article was formed from, the internet has advanced. Very much especially in modes of communication. It has caused several technologies and methods to go absolute, too easy that now you can’t underestimate its power, in a time such as this—21st century.

What you need now, is to focus your attention on how exactly, the internet will be used, to benefit your business. Use it to grow, increase your profits and influence, because that’s the now and future of business.

It doesn’t matter how much you like TV, Radio, Billboards and Newspapers, they are losing both attention and capacity to internet media. Almost every newspaper now, has an internet presence, TV and Radio stations are also moving to the internet, that’s because even they, know where people’s attention is. They know where the future is.

“Marketing is and has always been about connecting with your customers at the right time and place”. There are more people on the internet than they’re watching TV, listening to Radio, reading newspapers and staring at billboards combined.
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This is true. People are now on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram scrolling through content, watching videos on youtube, Vimeo and other internet video platforms. People are now busy searching for things they like and want to buy in search engines like google, bing and yahoo, they are expressing themselves in form of text, video and picture posts all over the internet, every second of every hour.

The Big Question—Are you going to help that customer find your business. Is your business going to take a share in providing for these people’s needs? Will they think of you when they want to buy it?

Yes, you can, be apart of it, your business can be the one, that provides content people are searching for, your company should be the one, making the posts that people scroll through. Its a choice, and you have to make it, because even indecisiveness is a decision, make the right one.

You have to remember these are people, already assembled online, and its up-to-you to position yourself in their direction. All it takes is to start and be serious about it. It takes hard work, yes. But all great things take hard work, and Internet marketing is not any different.

In very rare cases, does anyone need to spend their money on traditional marketing, because that money, can be put to better use with internet marketing. This is not because I think so, but rather I have seen it work.

Remember to have a strategy, and be willing to change it at any point in time, because things change, all the time. What works today may not necessarily work tomorrow, but you have to stay relevant. That’s why you should stay focused, keep testing, do your research and be willing to adapt to new trends. After all, “It’s like the animal kingdom. Adapt or go extinct.”—Brett Hull.

Does the conclusion seem too heavy to be of just this article? That’s because; This Article was re-modeled from a book by Peter E. Bampaire, Called “Internet Marketing In Under 1 Hour“

Any Questions/Inquiries? Drop them all in the “Click to Add Comment” section below.