At this point, we are all aware even if we don’t use it regularly personally of social media. It has been by far the most popular way to keep in touch with friends and family members, post videos of our children or events we’ve attended to share with the world and even a news source for some. Because of its growing popularity, social media isn’t just about being social anymore but has become a powerful marketing tool for any business. This becomes readily obvious if you observe just how many ads appear in your news feeds, and there is a method to this madness.
What business owners may not realize is that social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate that traditional outbound marketing. That’s effective social media as a marketing tool. At this point not having a social media presence is like walking by dollar bills on the street and not bothering to take the time to stop and pick them up. There are some more complicated aspects that it is a good idea to have a professional in the marketing and SEO business help you with, but setting up the basics is a task most users can handle and having some presence is better than none.
Social media is a great way to drive targeted traffic to your website easily. Have Recently added a new page, product or service to your site you want the world and potential clients to see? Creating social media posts with links to these pages is a quick and easy way to drive traffic to your site. As friends, family and current clients share these posts this only helps to spread the word to a greater audience. Creating social media links also provide a huge advantage to optimizing your website to search engines. The web crawlers that Google and the other main search engines take into account how much traffic a website receives and uses that information when calculating page rankings. In short, the more traffic you can drive to your site the more exposure it gets as well as a higher ranking with the search engine. All of those benefits for ten minutes of your time.
One of the unique advantages to using social media marketing, at least for the time being, is that most people don’t view Facebook and Twitter as marketing sites. They are considered to be more for social interaction. This means rather than feeling like they are looking at another annoying ad it is more viewed as having something useful to say. This in turn, makes them more likely to click on links you post further driving traffic to your site.
When marketing your business the importance of branding can’t be overstated, and social media provides an excellent outlet for brand recognition. The more you and your brand interact with customers, the less they see you as some business entity and more as a person. This builds a trust relationship which is the most fundamental building block in building sales. The more you can relate to people through your business, the more likely they are to turn to you when they need that product or service or refer your business to other people.
In the world of social media, people love the words “sale”, “discount”, “special” or “coupon code.” This also holds true in the real world, but it is an especially effective attention getter on social media sites. If you use this in conjunction with potential customers viewing your business from a human perspective rather than a business entity, it’s almost like winning the bonus on a double-down bet. Instead of thinking “This is some big company trying to suck me into buying something I don’t really need” it has more of “I’m familiar with this person and can identify with what they have to say, this might be worth looking into.”]
Investing the time and energy into a social media campaign is one of the strongest marketing decisions you can make for your business. It is a good idea to have a professional who knows all the tips and tricks of social media marketing to work with you, but even just the basics on your own provide a great deal of benefits. And the real kicker is, it doesn’t take much time at all to be able to do the basics and make regular posts to your social media accounts.
