Now that I’ve started a social media marketing agency, I get asked quite often why a brand would need social media in the first place. Some entrepreneurs/business owners see it as a powerful tool to be taken advantage of, to some, its a ‘buzzword with no practical advantages and a steep, complicated learning curve’.
Here are some ways social media marketing can improve your business:
- It will increase/develop Brand Recognition: Social Media provides your brand the opportunity to syndicate your content i.e. push your content onto third party platforms either as a full article, snippet, link, or thumbnail. The idea is to drive more engagement with your content by wiring it into related digital contexts, either to boost traffic to your site, create business conversions or just get exposure for your brand or your key personalities or products. Social media creates a level playing field where your brand becomes more accessible for new consumers, and makes you more familiar and recognisable for existing customers.
- Improve Brand Loyalty: Brand loyalty is partiality toward one particular business or product over a competitor. On social media, that loyal customer is more likely to comment, share, follow or post user generated content to your brand’s profile over another. That kind of behaviour can extend your business’ reach and impact beyond social media. Brand loyalty can be sparked, cultivated and maintained through smart social media engagement – all you have to do is include your customers in your story. Like any social media strategy, to see a payoff, engagement takes time and effort. Being there–whether it is to answer questions or provide a friendly face for your brand–is important when you’re trying to build lasting relationships with customers.
- Better Search Engine Rankings. SEO is the best way to capture relevant traffic from search engines, but the requirements for success are always changing. It’s no longer enough to regularly update your blog, ensure optimized title tags and meta descriptions, and distribute links pointing back to your site. Google and other search engines may be calculating their rankings using social media presence as a significant factor, because of the fact that strong brands almost always use social media. As such, being active on social media could act as a “brand signal” to search engines that your brand is legitimate, credible, and trustworthy. That means, if you want to rank for a given set of keywords, having a strong social media presence could be almost mandatory.
- Improved Customer Insights. Social media also gives you an opportunity to gain valuable information about what your customers are interested in and how they behave, via social listening. For example, you can monitor user comments to see what people think of your business directly. You can segment your content syndication lists based on topic and see which types of content generate the most interest—and then produce more of that type of content. You can measure conversions based on different promotions posted on various social media channels and eventually find a perfect combination to generate revenue.
- Higher conversion rates. Every post you make on a social media platform is an opportunity for customers to convert. When you build a following, you’ll simultaneously have access to new customers, recent customers, and old customers, and you’ll be able to interact with all of them. Every blog post, image, video, or comment you share is a chance for someone to react, and every reaction could lead to a site visit, and eventually a conversion. Brands become more humanised by interacting in social media channels. Social media is a place where brands can act like people do, and this is important because people like doing business with other people; not with companies.
These are the benefits of sustaining a long-term social media marketing campaign, but if you’re still apprehensive about getting started, consider these points:
- Your Competition Is Already Involved: Your competitors are already involved on social media, which means your potential social media traffic and conversions are being poached. Don’t let your competitors reap all the benefits while you stand idly by. If, somehow, your competition is not involved on social media, there’s even more of a reason to get started—the field is open.
- The Sooner You Start, the Sooner You Reap the Benefits: Social media is all about relationship building, and it tends to grow exponentially as your followers tell their friends, and their friends tell their friends, and so on. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll be able to start growing that audience.
- There’s nothing to lose. Enough said!
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