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What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media refers to websites which provide users with social interactivity. Twitter for instance is designed to allow users to post short messages or ‘updates’, so the user is ‘sharing’ their life experiences with their online community. Facebook, in-contrast is a full-featured social networking website which allows users to share longer messages, photos, videos, organize and join events, create community groups and pages etc. Then there are the professional social networks such as Linkedin, where people share more professional messages.

Social Media Marketing is the act of using social media websites as a channel to publish marketing information, interact with customers and sometimes even to the extent of selling. Strategic and intelligent use of social media can lead to gaining traffic and attention as well as building a relationship with prospects and customers.

9 Proven Benefits of Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing does more than just drive traffic to your website. If done properly, it can increase your overall business recognition and greatly expose your brand to an even wider audience. As of 2018, Hootsuite reported there are over 3.2 billion active social media users worldwide. Imagine the immense exposure your business could gain from social media exposure. In a study on social media trends by Hootsuite, 78% of respondents have either invested in social advertising or plan to do so in the next 12 months. If you’re still not doing it, your competitors most certainly are, let’s go through some of the proven benefits you stand to gain from implementing Social Media Marketing in your business.

Expanded Brand Visibility

We all have a brand, personal or business, and the hard truth is nobody cares about your brand. Yet we need our brand to be visible to wider audiences in order to grow it. Advertising might work, if you have deep pockets to compete with the big brands out there. Unfortunately, most small businesses don’t have deep pockets, some don’t even have marketing budgets.

All is not lost though, as we are lucky to be living in the era of the Internet and Social Media. Leveraging Social Media, small medium enterprises (SMEs) can expand their brand visibility not only to local markets, but to international markets as well. In fact, if executed correctly, Social Media Marketing can give you an edge over competitors big or small.

Using social media, you can get your brand in front of people much more easily and quickly, also it’s mostly FREE. Compared to traditional media, where prospects would have to either buy a magazine, or newspaper before they’re able to see your paid print ad.

With social Media, your audience is looking at your brand even when they aren’t thinking about your brand. This can be achieved if you have a proper content marketing strategy in place, as it blends your marketing messages into cleverly written content.

Seraph Studios - McDonald's Facebook Page

The McDonald’s Facebook Fan Page has prominent logo placements in the profile photo as well as on the header. You can even use a video as your header currently, you not only save costs on hefty TV commercial spots, but the reach is even higher. Try reaching an international audience with an Astro Ad, you get the picture.

Generate Conversations around your Brand

People like conversations, they talk about brands, products, services at the water cooler. People are social creatures and love to have conversations with likeminded people, by using Social Media, you can generate conversations about your brand, products and services.

Let’s take a look at a post from PlayStation. It’s a simple post which engages with its audience, by asking a question “What was your favorite quote from 2018?”, it got the fans into a conversation of like-minded people. Generating over 970 messages and 1094 shares, who knows how many more shares and messages will be generated on the second or third tier?

The difference between Social Media Marketing and Advertising is that with engaging posts like this, you are able to generate genuine conversation and collect authentic feedback about your products and services. It also gives you the chance to interact with your customers and prospects on a more personal level.

Seraph Studios - God of War Facebook post

Increased Inbound Traffic

We all want traffic to our website, but how can we drive traffic over? SEO is a long-term investment, and it takes 6 months and above to see effective results. SEM is costly and is mostly a short-term solution, kind of like a booster jab which lasts for the duration of the ad. The best way to create quick results which is low-cost as well as medium to long term is to leverage the power of Social Media Marketing.

Having over 2.17 billion active Facebook users and a 3.9% average engagement rate for page link posts, that’s nearly 85 million people clicking over to websites from Facebook every day. Imagine tapping into just 1% of that traffic and you would have 850,000 people visiting your site daily! The potential of driving traffic to your website just from Social Media Marketing alone is staggering. It’s time to get a share of that traffic don’t you think?

Build Backlinks

Building backlinks is no easy feat, but if you manage to build strong backlinks then it will greatly help not just your website ranking but also your overall brand exposure. You may have read that building links on social media does not help in SEO or website rankings because they’re ‘no-follow’ links, however it still brings traffic to your website if people click on it. This is all captured in your web analytics as traffic referrers.

Other than building backlinks directly on social media, there is a high chance someone will pick up your content, comment or link to a helpful resource on your website and post it on their own website. That’s assuming you published amazing content that attracted the relevant audience and has reshare value. Now If the published content was so awesome that it went viral, then you don’t even need to lift a finger as other community members help you build your backlinks.

As you can probably see more clearly now the interconnected relationship between Content Marketing and Social Media Marketing and the power it can wield when used in combination.

Increased Customer Satisfaction

Customer support and after sales service are usually where most companies fail, leaving their customers feeling sore, betrayed, neglected and eventually jumping over to the nearest competitor’s ship. Social Media gives you the opportunity to engage with prospects and customers on a personal level. If done right, this can be a huge advantage and big boost to customer retention and prospect conversion.

Customers are humans, and humans require attention. Through social media, personal attention can be given to each customer. This sort of personal engagement can increase your customer satisfaction and build meaningful social relationships. Social media doesn’t make customer service easier, but it gives you the tool to interact immediately and gather customer feedback.

Social media has become a communication tool, and building this channel into a strong bridge between your business and your customers will inevitably lead to better customer and brand loyalty as we will get to next. In today’s highly connected world, social media is communication.

Increased Brand Loyalty

Branding can be very costly, building brand loyalty is even more of a challenge. What was once only possible for large corporations with deep pockets is now possible for small business owners, minus the exorbitant price tag.

As mentioned above, customers follow and interact with their favorite brands. Research shows that 53% of customers who follow your brand will likely to be loyal to it. The key to keeping customers loyal is to engage with them on an emotional level. It is now possible using Social Media’s various tools such as direct messaging, replying and participating in discussion threads and comments, or you could be more proactive and send your customers surprises such as promo codes. Asking open ended questions as seen in the example above is also a good way to get your audience to participate and engage with your brand.

Meaningful engagements that connect with people emotionally is your key, and now you have the vehicle to do it.

Stronger Brand Authority

What is an authority? It’s someone we look up to and trust, who’s words will influence our decisions. To become an authority, you first need to demonstrate your expertise, in this scenario, it would mean publishing useful and relevant information. Be consistent at it and eventually your business will be seen as a trusted source of information in your niche.

Not only will your audience trust your brand as a subject matter expert and authority, the more content you publish, the more search engines will pick up your authority on the subject. Having high authority pages on your website will bring in more traffic to your website, eventually leading to increased Domain Authority and a higher rank on search engine results pages.

Start putting out amazing content not just on your website, but also your social media and build up your brand authority steadily.

Cost Savings

Social Media is mostly FREE, although this does not make it easy; and if you put in the time and effort, you are on your way to increased traffic, higher rankings and exponential business growth. All of this can be achieved with minimum spending.

You can also opt to boost your organic growth in order to see results quicker by investing minimal budgets into social media advertising. Now is the best time to take advantage of the low prices of Facebook ads, as Gary Vaynerchuk put it, “Facebook ads are still highly underpriced, but not for long.”.

You stand to gain more than spend executing a Social Media Marketing campaign today, your competitors are catching on, don’t be left in the dust when their sales skyrocket and yours remain stagnant.

Access to Marketplace Insights

Traditional advertising and marketing efforts were clunky, expensive and nearly immeasurable. Ask a newspaper how did your ad did and the most they’d be able to give you is their subscriber numbers and distribution numbers, maybe some demographic data, but that’s about it.

Digital media is a totally different animal, it gives you insights to your market, from detailed demographic data, which type of content was the most popular, to the time and day your audience are most active. This sort of information will be able to help you tweak your strategy and create more relevant content for your audience.

There is a plethora of audience data accessible to you via social media, giving you and edge over competitors who are still clinging to the old ways. Embrace it, and see your business grow to new heights.

Keep Your Audience Updated

What better way to announce the launch of your next great product, service or upcoming event than to the people who are already engaging with your business on Social Media? It will get your followers excited, inform your prospects and keep everyone updated on your business activities.

Go where the people are, and bring them back to your homebase – your website. There has never been a better, and more immediate outlet to disseminate news and updates, back then we had to get the newspaper, or wait for your evening news, or go to the mall to get the latest news. Not anymore, social media is beating other channels in terms of immediacy, and anything new requires immediate attention.

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