Why is Social Media Marketing Important?

Social Media has become increasingly important and impactive in today's world. Different platforms have different audiences and business uses, so each business needs to decide which platform works best for them. Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are among the top 10 most visited websites in the world. Overall, in January 2019, there were 3.484 billion people reported to be on at least one social media platform- a whopping 48% of the world population. Obviously, you can see why this is an incredibly important marketing tool for businesses, but in what ways?

 Branding

Used properly, social media can help you brand your company and products . When done poorly it has no impact.

 But when you have a good social media strategy, you will get a number of benefits in terms of your efforts to raise awareness for your brand:

●     More people will see and become aware of your brand

●     If you post regularly, you will benefit from repetition, which will help to keep your brand at the forefront of your customer's minds

●     Build strong brand loyalty

The final point is one of the most important, as social media has the power to improve the loyalty of your customers and create advocates for your brand. As brand advocates are one of the best marketing tools you can have, this point alone makes social media marketing an essential tool for business.

Conversions

Social media can also help you to directly increase your conversions. For example, a shop works to build a fan base, posts an offer, and sees the traffic and sales increase in their shop. It could also mean increased traffic to your website or new signups to your email newsletter.

The key to this is not selling too strongly when you use social media. Social media is a soft selling tool, where you engage in a conversation with customers over time, and use subtle selling and marketing messages at key points to generate conversions.

Customer research

Social media is also a valuable tool for customer research. This can take many forms, including crowdsourcing your questions (e.g., asking your fan base or followers silly or fun questions that build knowledge about them over time).

But it can also be much more detailed than this, particularly given the level of user statistics that many social media platforms offer. You can find out a lot about your users, including their age, sex, and the type of content that they like.

Search engine rankings

Finally, search engines use social media signals as one of the factors when deciding on search engine rankings. It looks at all of the key factors, such as liking and sharing. Exactly how they use this information to rank your web pages is not exactly known, but pages and websites that perform well on social media are given a boost in search. It makes sense, as search engines want to give users the best results. If your audience finds your content useful on social media and “likes” and shares the content, it’s a good indicator that people will also find it useful in a search result.

Social media marketing is beneficial to businesses when done right. It takes careful planning and a commitment overtime, but real results are possible when content and search are integrated.