Schaffner - Social media marketing workbook 2019: how to leverage the power of Facebook advertising, Instagram marketing, YouTube and SEO to explode your business and personal brand

During the last few years, entrepreneurship and freelancing have been on the rise. So many people have been opening their own businesses, making money on the side and, in a growing number of cases, quitting their jobs to commit themselves fully to their own brand. All a person really needs to attract clients is access to the Internet. That, combined with the growing desire, particularly by the newer generations, to not be stuck in the traditional 9 to 5 lifestyle, is resulting in a huge shift in the way that people work. They want to have freedom to work from home, from the cafe, from the beach or from the other side of the world; and they want to be their own bosses.

Everybody is on social media and everybody uses search engines when they need to know more information about any given topic. That means that, for business owners - be it traditional ones or the entrepreneurs and freelancers I just talked about - it is absolutely crucial to invest in Digital Marketing efforts, and both Social Media Marketing and SEO are two of the biggest components of that area.

Social Media Marketing is a form of Digital Marketing that, just like the name suggests, consists of any efforts you put into the usage of social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, to promote a business and increase traffic and leads. Different businesses have different goals, needs and customers, and that translates into the type of platforms that are more advantageous for them, but I will dive into that later in the e-book.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it consists of the efforts invested towards improving a websites organic traffic on search engines. In other words, working on your SEO means working on your website so that, when a user searches for certain keywords that you define, your website will appear, at least, on the first Search Engine Result Page (SERP) - and, of course, the ultimate goal is for your web page to be the first one on the list of results.

If you have a business or are starting one in 2019, there is no doubt about whether or not you should invest in these areas, and statistics from previous years prove so:

• The Global Digital Report 2018 , by We are Social and Hootsuite, states that in 2017, over 4 billion people worldwide used the internet and a little over 3 billion were active social media users (you should also consider the fact that these numbers have been continuously increasing over time so, as I write this e-book they should be bigger and, as you read it, even bigger). The same report showed that, in January of 2018, each person spent an average of 6 hours a day using internet-powered devices and services (Kemp, 2018) and that, although the distribution of Internet is not yet balanced, countries with low penetration rates have seen a fast and continuous growth on their Internet usage .
• According to The 2018 Sprout Social Index: Realign & Redefine report, 60% of consumers want to know about new products and services on social media , 59% are interested in educational posts , 56% in entertainment , and 49% in inspirational posts .
• 58% of users prefer visual content , which comes as no surprise, since the human brain processes images 60 000 times faster than text (Elsenberg, 2014).
• 45% of consumers use social media for customer service purposes .
• During 2017, for each second that went by, there were 11 new social media users. Crazy, isnt it?
• In 2017, users spent almost 1.5 trillion dollars on e-commerce .

For someone who owns a business but whos not familiar with Digital Marketing, Social Media Marketing might seem like something really easy to handle, while SEO might seem like the complete opposite. As you will understand throughout this e-book, neither of those is necessarily true. However, before you even think about your digital presence, your brand needs to be well settled - and that is exactly what I will talk about in the next chapter.