Social media has brought the biggest change in the way people communicate and get informed in the world since the invention of the telephone. In less than a decade more than half of the world population, and more than 80% of the population in the USA have opened accounts on one or more of the most popular social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, Linkedin, etc., and use them regularly. And these numbers are expected to grow over the next years.
Naturally, businesses have also been largely impacted by this huge change and for the most part positively. In recent years social media has become a crucial channel through which businesses across industries reach their target audience and build lasting relationships with potential consumers. Good social media presence is a major aspect of any successful marketing strategy for many reasons.
Enhanced Organic Traffic
Finding ways to keep your social media audience engaged can have a huge positive impact on your business’ success. The most important reason for this is the fact that it attracts website organic traffic. When you have active social media profiles and you post content that resonates with your target audience, it improves your brand positioning.
This is why it’s not a good idea to base your strategy on simply increasing the number of followers. For instance, convinced that the number itself makes a big difference in brand visibility, many companies opt for buying Instagram followers. However, this simulated popularity isn’t going to bring you any results. Instead, you should find ways to get organic Instagram followers, or in other words, real people, who will interact with your posts.
Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean that paid ads and other paid strategies are bad for business. However, you shouldn’t rely only on them. To keep the people who stumbled upon your profiles, whether it was through targeted ads, search engines, or in any other way, you have to offer them something that will inspire them to stay. Social media can only be a true help for your business marketing strategy if you offer quality content, adapted for the particular social media platform.
Read: What is Social Media Management?
Increased Brand Awareness
The biggest challenge for businesses nowadays can be to become visible to their ideal customers. This is another reason why building a good social media presence should be a priority in your marketing strategy. Building brand awareness takes a lot of time and effort and social media, if used strategically, can get you closer to your goals faster. In fact, it has become crucial in the initial promotion of your brand to the public for new businesses.
It’s important to remember that anything you share will forever be associated with your brand. This is why you have to make sure that you post content that is not only respectful and in line with what you want your brand to represent, but also valuable for your ideal clients.
Help them solve a problem, teach them something, be interesting, educational, creative, and use various forms of content (video, images, audio, text), etc. You can also use methods that are on-trend at the moment, such as using relevant hashtags, inventing challenges, surveys, competitions, and so on.
Read: Top 5 Social Media Strategies for Startups
Better Understanding of Your Ideal Customer
Thanks to the increasing number of businesses using social media to promote their brand and, ultimately, grow their business, these platforms have been constantly upgrading their software, providing more and more services that can help businesses’ marketing strategies. Marketers can take advantage of these features to optimize your social media reach and increase your ROI.
One of the biggest advantages of social media, thanks to all of these improvements designed to help businesses enhance their reach, is the insight you can get into your audience behavior and acceptance of what you are offering. This will allow you to analyze important metrics such as reach, audience growth, conversion, engagement, and brand awareness. And through this insight businesses can understand their audience better and improve their tactics, optimize their content, etc. Most importantly, these findings may apply to their overall marketing strategy.
What’s Next?
Now that you know some of the ways a good social media presence can help your marketing strategy your next step should be building it. While success can never be truly guaranteed, the best way to improve your chances for a marketing campaign that will bring you the desired ROI is to hire professionals knowledgeable in social media strategies.
Make sure that whoever you hire feels like they understand your brand and your specific needs. Aside from being a balanced mixture of paid ads, quality content, SEO, and so on, your marketing strategy should also be continuously monitored and analyzed, and subsequently optimized accordingly.