Social Media Marketing is the act of creating brand awareness to drive targeted traffic from social media sites. These include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, G+, Pinterest, Youtube, Flickr, Community Forums, etc. Popular social platforms have become marketing giants, offering businesses,valuable data about their customers and a (mostly) free way to reach them. There are over 3 billion internet users—and over 2 billion of them have active social media accounts.It’s 2018 and social media is growing at warp speed. With more and more people joining social media sites and using them regularly/efficiently, the social media industry is bound to become bigger in the coming years. It’s booming like never.The social media wave isn’t ending anytime soon. And the business should take advantage of it if we want it to survive. With such amazing growth, every business today needs to leverage proper social media channels in the best possible way. Not because it’s the “in thing”, and not because it sounds simple, but because their target audience is hanging around the popular social networks. And they’re engaging with their favorite brands and connecting with them on different levels.By giving our business brand the social media touch, we not only generate more business but also connect with our customers better and serve them on a higher level. It actually makes our online marketing easier.
IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL MEDIA FOR BUSINESS :
Gain Valuable Customers Insight
Social media produces a vast amount of data about customers in real time. Every day there are over 500 million Tweets, 4.5 billion Likes on Facebook, and 95 million photos and videos uploaded to Instagram.Behind these staggering numbers is a wealth of information about our customers—who they are, what they like, and how they feel about our brand.Through daily active social interaction from users, we can gather appropriate customer data and make smarter business decisions.
Increase Brand Awareness and Loyalty
Building a brand and the associations people have with our organization can be done through the content we produce. Regularly publishing high-quality material that addresses the needs of our users will help to establish us in a position of trust. When we show that we are regularly the site to turn to when people have questions about our industry, we will build our brand awareness and our reputation.When we have a presence on social media, we can make it easier for our customers to find and connect with us. By connecting with our customers on social, we’re more likely to increase customer retention and brand loyalty.
Run Targeted Ads With Real – Time Results
Social ads are an inexpensive way to promote our business and distribute content. They also offer powerful targeting options so that we can reach the right audience. For example, if we run an ad campaign on LinkedIn, we can segment by things like location, company, job title, gender, and age—the list goes on. If we’re running a Facebook ad, we can target based on location, demographics,interests, behaviors, and connections. We can track and measure the performance of our social ads in real time.
Generate Higher Converting Leads
When we select the right audience with the ads there is a possibility of getting more conversions. So social media increases sales and customer retention through regular interaction and timely customer service. Put calls-to-action in people’s natural eye path. Use pop-up and slide-in forms the right way. Pop-ups have been vilifid in the last few years — and quite understandable.
Provide Rich Customer Experiences
Social media is a two-way channel where we have the opportunity to enhance relationships with our customers. For example, if we have received a complaint from a customer, we should give an immediate response with a satisfactory answer and try to solve it as quick as possible. This may help to build a positive relationship with the customers. We can also do some activities like contests, dialogues & more to retain our customers. This type of social media activities between brands and customers is something traditional advertising cannot achieve.
Increase Website Traffic and Search Rankings
The most important benefit of social media for business is using it to increase website traffic. Social media not only help us, but also direct people, to visit our website and increase our search ranking with more social shares. For example, if every person who follows our website on Twitter Retweets this post, it’s more likely to rank higher in Google’s search engine results page for variations of “social media for business.”
Find Out What Competitors Are Doing
With Social Media Monitoring we can gain key information about our competitors. This kind of Intel will allow us to make strategic business decisions to stay ahead of them. For example, we can create search streams in our blog to monitor industry keywords and mentions of ourcompetitors names and products. Based on our search results, we can improve our business to offer product enhancements, service, or content that they may be missing.
Share Content Easier and Faster
Marketers faced a lot of challenges in reaching their content to the customers in the past with shortest possible time. With the help of social media specifically, when it comes to sharing content or for content curation all we need to do is share it on our brand’s social network accounts. Sharing content triggers faster growth of our social media communities. It also helps to build our authority and engage with thought leaders.
Geotarget Content
Geo-targeting is the method of determining the geolocation of a website visitor and delivering different content to that visitor based on his or her location such as country, region/state, city, metro code/zip code, organization, IP address, ISP or other criteria. Geo-targeting is an effective way to send our message out to a specific audience based on their location. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter have tools that allow us to communicate the right kind of content to our audience.
Build Relationships
Social media isn’t about blasting our company’s sales pitch on social, it’s a two-way channel where we have the opportunity to enrich relationships with our customers. For example, social media allows tourism brands to create dialogue with travellers, therefore creating relationships with customers before, during, and after they have booked a trip with the company. This kind of social media dialogue between brands and customers is something traditional advertising cannot achieve.