dreamstime_socialmedia
As a result of the evolution of the Internet, Social Media is now at the heart of the most effective online marketing strategies. These highly interactive sites where visitors can create input are hotbeds of influence and communication among their users.

Because of the potential for both help and harm to your business, you can no longer afford to ignore the impact of social media.

Once you get started with social media, here are five ways it can help you grow your business:

First, It can improve your “Reach”

Reach refers to the number of peole who hear, see or otherwise are impacted by your message.

Consider the role of social media in extending your reach+

• Over 2.1 billion people have social media accounts. That’s the vast majority of people online.
• YouTube alone has over 1 billion viewers. That’s obviously a huge number. Less obviously, it’s more than a 1/3 of all web users. Daily, YouTube visitors view hundreds of millions of hours of video. Since most videos are 10 minutes or less, there are billions of views that make up those hours. Each view is a decision (essentially, a vote) for that video.
• Facebook alone has about 1.4 billion users, 47% of all Internet users. Every day, its users create 4.5 billion Likes. And this activity can be a big source of revenue for businesses whose products are Liked. And the revenue comes from more than PC and Mac users. In fact, nearly 75% of Facebook’s revenue comes from mobile advertising to those people. 936 million Facebook users login in at least once daily and 52% of marketers found a customer on Facebook in 2013.
• Twitter has 316 million active users every month, and they create 500 million tweets each day
• Google+ has 363 million users. They are passionate about their preferences; they hit the +1 button 5 billion times per day.
• Pinterest has 100 million users, 85% of which are women. Pinterest users are shoppers. 47% of them have purchased a product based on pins, with the average sale being $58.95. Businesses are starting to create a lot of pinned content, 67% of the pinned content comes from businesses. And Pinterest users are brand-conscious; 82% of Pinterest users would rather follow a brand than a celebrity.

These stats illustrate the improved reach that social media can have for your business. And this is true for both online and offline businesses.

Second, Social media can help with building relationships with your customers and prospects.

When you place content on social media and interact with people on social media, it allows you to reach people on a more personal level.

Social media is about relationships building. That’s the driver for the popularity of Facebook, Twitter, and similar sites. People are there to “connect.”
If you are there to connect with them, an audience will “self select” to become a part of your conversation.

Once they are engaged in a conversation with you, conversions (optins, sales, subscriptions, etc.) will naturally follow. Your calls to action will find people who respond. When you connect with people and they connect with you, they will feel a kinship that will lead to a long-term marketing opportunity.

Third, it will let you show off your best content to a larger audience

Social media allows you to expose your best content to a wide audience, an audience that potentially will care about all your brand has to offer.

By using text, images, video, or all of the above, you can create a custom campaign to impress your target audience with the best content, products, and services that your brand has to offer.

This isn’t a “one size fits all” process, though. Each social media platform has its own norms for content. What you place on Instagram should not be exactly the same as what you place on Facebook, which, in turn, is different from what you place on Twitter.

You need to look at each platform, observe how the experienced hands are using it, and take the same proven approach.

Tailoring your campaign to the various social media platforms will bring you higher readership or viewership (or, in general terms, reach).

This way, you can take advantage of the strengths of each platform to build your brand recognition, increase customer engagement, and provide a better customer experience.

Fourth, social media can build steady and reliable traffic for your primary site.

In the fight for organic traffic, social media can be your winning strategy. Google and the other search engines are continually refining their algorithm that pick the winners in the SERP race.

Social media can help you in two ways. People on social media can read your content there and click through to your site or to other sites you promote; Google isn’t an intermediary.

This can bring a steady, long term, reliable stream of traffic to your sites and blogs. And you don’t have to worry that this traffic will end due to some entity coming along and wiping you out.

Also, the search engines pay attention to what is going on in social media. (They call these mentions, Likes, etc. “social signals.”) The more your site is mentioned in social media, the higher the seearch engines will rank your site.

Fifth, social media can increase your control over your ultimate success.

When you post on social media, you have full control of what is said about your company, brand, and website to your target audience; you are saying it, after all. You can tailor your marketing content to meet specific goals. Whether it’s a product launch or a new direction or any other change, you can focus on what’s important to you.

People are using social media and your business will come up in their discussion. When you participate, too, you have a way to making sure your real story is heard, not just someone’s opinions. You don’t want to leave anything to chance.

There are many tracking and testing tools available, such as, Klout, SumAll, BuzzSumo, and TweetReach, that will let you measure the impact of your social media work. By following your status in these tools, you can tweak your campaigns as needed to improve conversion results.

So, here’s the bottom line. There is no better time than now to take charge of your image that your audience sees on social media. If you have an online business and do not have a social media presence then you are left out of the conversations going on there. And that can be disastrous.

If you want to know more about using social media in marketing, you can check out our other articles here: IM NewsWatch articles about Social Media.

There are many helpful guides online to get you started, and educating yourself on social media marketing is critical to your long-term success.

Sharing is caring