What is Social Media Marketing, and Why Social Media is Important for Business?
What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing is the medium to promote a business, products, services, and a person using social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, and Twitter, etc. Social media marketing is a good platform for both consumers and businesses. But for businesses what matters is the content should be unique, engaging, informational, and friendly that people love to like, retweet, and share on their profile.
Social media marketing is about reaching your target audience and customers where they are and as they interact socially with each other and your brand.
While social media marketing is incredibly valuable and profitable for the growth of your business (as you will see in the following section), your strategy will vary depending on which audience your users spend their time on social networks.
Before we discuss more about social media marketing, let's quickly know how and which platform can help your business.
- Users: 1.73 billion daily active users worldwide
- Audience: Generation X and Millennials
- Industry Impact: B2C
- Best for: Brand awareness; advertisement
- Users: 126 million daily active users worldwide
- Audience: Mainly millennials
- Industry Impact: B2B and B2C
- Best for: Public Relations; customer service
- Users: 1 billion monthly active users
- Audience: mainly millennials
- Industry Impact: B2C
- Best for: natural-looking media, behind-the-scenes and user-generated content; advertisement
- Users: 675 million monthly active users worldwide
- Audience: Baby Boomer, Generation X, and Millennials
- Industry Impact: B2B
- Best for B2B Business Marketing, Employment Marketing, Business Development
- Users: 367 million monthly active users worldwide
- Audience: Mainly older millennials and younger baby boomers
- Industry Impact: B2C
- Best for: visual advertising; Source of Inspiration
YouTube
- Users: There are more than Over 2 billion logged-in monthly users worldwide
- Audience: Millennials, closely followed by Generation Z
- Industry Impact: B2C
- Best for: Brand awareness; Entertainment, and Video How
Snapchat
- Users: 229 million daily active users worldwide
- Audience: Mainly Generation Z
- Industry Impact: B2C
- Best for: Brand awareness; advertisement
Now that we have broadened the core principles of each social media network, let's discuss why social media marketing is beneficial for your business.
Why social media is important for business marketing
Let's begin with a fact: Your business requires a social media presence.
It doesn't matter if you run a small local shop or a large national company. Social media is an essential part of your business marketing strategy.
Social Media Platforms help you to connect with your target audience, increase brand awareness, post engagement, and boost your leads and sales. With more than three billion people around the world using social media every month, users and engagement on major platforms just keep growing.
What you may not know is that you are ready to remove your company's social media from the ground right now. You don't need to know everything or have a magical number of followers. You can get started right away - and even enjoy yourself in the process.
Social media offers a lot of potential for businesses as consumers log on to it daily and come in contact with companies. Thus, it also has many challenges that businesses face, as it is changing constantly which is extremely noisy and crowded.
It can be difficult to keep up with the evolving trends on social media, so B2B review and rating firm Clutch partnered with digital marketing agency Smart Insights to find out the current state of social media marketing; They surveyed 344 social media marketers around the world to invest in the value of social media, the most engaging content to share, common challenges, and social media resource businesses.
That Result?
- 52 percent of social media marketers believe that social media positively affects their company's revenue and sales.
- The five most valuable social media platforms:
- Facebook (89 percent)
- LinkedIn (83 percent)
- YouTube (81 percent)
- Twitter (80 percent)
- Instagram (56 percent)
- About 80 percent of companies share mostly original content on social media.
- The most important metrics for companies are engagement (36 percent) and conversion rate (35 percent).
- Social media is more valuable to B2C (58 percent) than B2B companies (46 percent).
- The biggest challenges with social media are:
- Lack of adequate human and financial resources (26 percent)
- Lack of a formal strategy (24 percent)
- Build a community of followers and influencers (24 percent)
- If you are still not convinced, here are things that you may feel yourself that social media is wise business.
1. Get Attention and Build Awareness
If your customer isn't aware about you, then they can't buy from you. Social media increases your visibility among potential customers, allowing you to reach a wider audience using a huge amount of time and effort. And it's free to create a business profile on all major social networks, so you have nothing to lose.
Here's a fact: Social media gets attention on content.
However, it is easy for a consumer to get overwhelmed by companies trying to promote their brand on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms. How can a company create relevant content in such a crowded place?
In the above survey, articles, videos, and pictures were the most successful at engaging customers and breaking through that noise.
This is where the original material intersects with quality design. Between GIFs, memes, Facebook Live, and more, a content strategy has to be thoughtfully executed. What message do your customers want to see, how are they going to identify with your brand, and what will they get to click or comment on your post?
To develop a social media strategy for brand awareness you want to opt-out of social media. Do you want your audience to discover you and buy your services? Do you hope to bring more local shoppers to your store? Keeping your strategy specific, you can determine which social media channels are best suited for your business.
2. Communications Authority
Customers are increasingly savvier and are more discerning about which businesses they support. Before making a decision, they will do a quick search to browse your website and social media.
What will they find an empty and boring storefront or a rich source of information with great representation? Setting up your profile, will frequently update and relevant information will increase your brand awareness, business authority, and it will also ensure that you make your first impression to your customers through social media showing that your business is trustworthy, Is enlightening, and acceptable.
Look for ways to showcase your expertise as a thought leader in your industry - such as writing pieces related to your expertise or expanding on your company's mission. By showing your business offering and values, you will establish trust in potential customers.
3. Show Authenticity
Customers are not interested in businesses that publish social media posts in a dry, corporate style.
Instead, let your brand personality shine through everything you share on social media. What does your brand sound like? How does it reflect who you are? While brands need to be polite and empowered for their audience, it is more important to find a voice and take a stand.
Practice getting your tone right, be it casual and fun or formal and friendly. Be true to who you are, not what you think you should be. Followers want to see the real people behind your social profile.
You may also like to read:- What is Digital Marketing? Why Do You Need to Promote Business?
4. Encourage Engagement
Sometimes, a seemingly simple social media post, such as promoting a pair of shoes, can get many likes, comments, and shares. People can also ask strangers in the feed if they have found their shoes, how long did the shipping take them if they liked them, and other questions.
Social media opens the conversation for quick interaction, relationship building and customer loyalty, also it helps you with SEO and digital marketing.
Social media channels are changing constantly, evolving new things, adding new features, and these changes can be intimidating for some business.
But remember: you don't have to do everything. Play in a new way to connect with your audience, and allow yourself to learn as you go. One day, you can post a series of Instagram stories to customers visiting the back of your office. Next, you can host a quick Q&A session via Facebook Live Video Streaming. Over time, you will get a better idea of your followers' preferences.
You also can create an engaging video for social platforms at affordable charges, or for free with a simple setup using a good lighting, smartphone, and a tripod. Also, do a test run before going live to ensure sufficient speed to avoid delays and interruptions to your Internet connection or hotspot.
5. Grow Affordably
Yes, social media is not a very high selling place, but ultimately, it is a marketing channel and you do not need to ignore the opportunity to make a sale, should it present itself. Sponsored information on timelines, videos with the CTA, cross-channel retargeting, and showable posts are the mainstay of social media.
Marketing costs increase, not every business can have huge campaigns. But you can receive a lot of value for the money you invest in social media advertising. Your business has the opportunity to grow its audience and reach its objectives through advertisements on social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, regardless of size or budget. Even though platforms such as Instagram are primarily leading to engagement, there are ways to increase sales on them.
Most businesses are data-driven, but social media is not a determined stone science. For example, you can scroll through an advertisement featuring a giant scoop of melting chocolate cream with a mound of whipped cream. You may not think twice about it, but three days later, you can stop by Beskin-Robbins because you were craving the scoop of chocolate ice cream. Social media can contribute to the decision-making process of the buyer.
When building an advertising campaign, know what you are trying to reach and what goal you want to achieve so that you do not waste any of your budget on useless advertising. Avoid high-selling advertisements, and choose content that educates or entertains (or does both at the same time).
6. Improves brand loyalty
The presence of social media makes it easier for your customers to find and connect with you. This will help improve customer retention and customer loyalty. Since developing a loyal customer base is the main goal of any business, social media should be in your strategy. Typically, brand loyalty and customer satisfaction go hand-in-hand. Social media is not limited to just offering your product; It can also be used for promotional campaigns. A customer considers these as service channels where they can communicate directly with the business.
7. Increases Traffic
One major advantage of social media is that it helps in increasing the traffic to your website. By sharing your content on social media, you are providing users to click through your website and make it available for more information. The way blogging is important for SEO sharing quality content on social accounts is also important for more inbound traffic to generate while creating conversion opportunities.
8. Increases SEO Rankings
In ranking calculations, website presence in social media as well as on-page optimization is becoming an essential factor for website SEO Ranking. The algorithm that achieves a successful ranking continues to evolve. Nowadays, it is not enough to just optimize your website and update your blog regularly. Successful brands have a healthy social media presence. This presence serves as an indication to search engines that your brand is valuable, credible, and credible.
You may also like to read:- What is SEO? Why SEO is Important to Promote Your Website?
9. Engaging Customers
One of the best reasons for marketing your business through social media is that your customers are already spending time on these platforms. It is a good way to connect and interact with customers on a personal level. By doing simple market research you can help determine which social networks your target audience uses the most. Additionally, by communicating and engaging with your customers, you can win their attention and convey your brand message. This way you can reach more audiences in real time and establish yourself in the market.
10. Provide support
Social media has broken the barriers by bringing the customers and companies together at a single platform. Now, instead of calling the customer service line, many people turn to Facebook or Twitter to solve problems or get information.
Develop your reputation as a responsive, caring brand by supporting through social channels:
- Create a system to track customer comments, questions and complaints on social media.
- Answer questions and concerns as much as possible.
- Get out of your way to be positive and supportive.
- Listen to criticism and make customers feel heard.
- Learn to resolve public conversations in private messages.
How to measure the output of social media marketing?
One of the most important aspects of social media marketing is to make sure that your efforts are successful in helping you meet your goals. To determine this, you need to keep track of all your posts, each channel. You can do this by evaluating and managing your social platform metrics.
Social media metrics
Social media metrics are data related to the success of your post and its impact on your audience and customers across different platforms. These metrics can include data about your engagement levels, likes, followers, shares and all other activities on your platform.
Here are the 10 most important metrics to track you:
- Engagement: This includes clicks, comments, likes, and replies to your social media posts. There are also platform-specific types of engagements such as "Saved" posts on Instagram and "Pinned" posts on Pinterest.
- Access: You have access to the number of views of any content related to your page or profile.
- Followers: This is the number of people on your profile who have clicked on your "Follow" button and regularly see their content in their feed.
- Impact: This is how often a post is viewed from your profile or page, whether or not your audience members click on it. This is often the case when someone is scrolling through their feed but does not click on anything.
- Video Views: On Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, or any other social channel with video capabilities, this is the number of views per view.
- Profile Visits: The number of people who visit your social media page is the number of visits to your profile.
- Mention: This is when your profile is mentioned by members of the audience on their posts.
- Tags: This is when your visitors add the name of your company profile or your hashtag to another post.
- Post again: This is when a member of your audience posts a portion of their content on their profile.
- Shares: These are posts that your followers and viewers take from your profile and share with your network.
You can influence all of these metrics, increase your social following, and improve overall engagement on your profile, and using the same strategy you can build leads and drive conversions. You can talk to your followers more often, tag them in content, answer their questions such as their posts, encourage them to use your hashtag and share your content (And you can republish user-generated content).
How to measure social media metrics
You can review social media metrics in different ways, for example, using analytics tools built into different platforms that you use. Here are some examples:
You can also use analytics and tracking tools such as Google Analytics. That is a good option, if you want to track how your social media and websites are performing. Finally, many social media scheduling solutions - as we reviewed earlier - have developed their own monitoring and tracking features. All of these metric tracking tools will give you a better understanding of who your followers and viewers respond well to and what you should consider. Improve engagement.
Now that we've reviewed the benefits of social media marketing and how to tailor your strategy, let us tell you about the different resources available to you.
Social media is a must for businesses
Social media is an important part of marketing your business, but managing it should not be stressful. Take the first step, create a profile, and start connecting with your customers.
As it continues to weave itself into the daily patterns of our lives, more and more consumers will turn to new and upcoming social platforms for purchasing decisions.
Those who have a strong social media presence and branding will increase conversion rates, whereas without active social media campaigns they may lose potential customers. Which company would you like to join?
How has social media proved to be a wise business venture for you? Let us know in the comments below!
Why We Care:-
We OXO Solutions, are in this business for the last 12 years, and we care about our customers, and people who show interest in our website development, website redesign, mobile app development services, and digital marketing solutions.
With our service, we have helped many businesses in making their work easy with our innovations and technology, and also with the right strategy, we have generated business for companies with our digital marketing and search engine optimization services, and we would love to help you in any manner we can do to make your work effortless with AI-based solutions, web development or internet marketing solutions.
Conclusion:
Today, it is almost impossible for any business to succeed without the presence of social media. It's a low-cost way to connect with customers and build brand awareness. Regular updates of the right social media and digital marketing strategy will improve traffic, SEO, brand loyalty, and more. So take the first step and create a profile, the earlier you get started, the faster you will see your business.