How does Social Media Marketing Help Businesses?

Social media marketing is a great way for businesses to connect with customers and followers online. By creating profiles and pages on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, businesses can share information about their company, products and services, and employees. Additionally, social media can be used to engage with customers and followers, promote events and special offers, and collect feedback.

What is Social Media Marketing (SMM)?

Social Media Marketing is the use of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok to promote either a product or service.

There are multiple ways that a company can promote their products or services on social media however, we will cover this later so keep reading to find out.

How Popular is Social Media Marketing

One of the main reasons social media marketing is still relevant today is because of the number of people on social media and the benefits it provides for businesses, but we will cover what those benefits are later.

It isn’t surprising to that hear over half of the world uses social media (59%), but when you actually consider what that number be, truth be told it’s a shock that some companies do not have a social media profile on any platform. I find it impossible to imagine a company that wants to shut themselves away from an audience of 4.7 BILLION users who spend an average of 149 minutes on social media daily.

If you want to find out how much time everyone all together spends daily on social media, that number would be 700.3 billion. So, in those 700.3 billion minutes people will find either one of your social media posts, or they will find your social media profile.

At this point they have the choice to either check out your profile or they continue scrolling. Now the most likely option will be option B but, you can change this by creating interesting posts that grabs people’s attention, how do you create interesting posts you say, well I’m glad you asked.

How to get started with social media marketing

Now you may be wondering why this section is called how to get started with social media marketing rather than how to create interesting social media posts, that will be covered in this section as well, after all it is apart of how people should get started with social media.

The main thing you want focus on first is the reason your using social media in the first place, what is your objective, why are you doing this.

After you will want to start small, be selective, creating a social media profile on all platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and trying to build a following on all of them at once is the worst thing you could do.

Instead of doing this you should be selective and only choose 1 or 2 social media platforms to start out on. Instead of being a small fish in the ocean, be a small fish in a pool, and build up from there.

Next you should figure out how often you want to post on social media, once a month, once a week, once a day, you get the point. It is recommended on most social media platforms to post 3 to 5 times a week. However, the one thing you need to make sure is that you don’t post, just to post, make sure you posts has value or is relevant.

These are the main things you should do or consider when creating a social media profile, but now onto how to create interesting social media posts. Here is a list of points to consider if you want your social media post to be interesting and shared among multiple users:

• Create high quality content- this one may seem obvious, but it is often forgotten, there are no shortcuts when creating high quality content because this takes time, research and creating the content creation.

• Make sure the posts provide value – if you choose to create and post informational content you should make sure the information you are sharing is relevant to your audience. This is because sharing irrelevant content to your audience will cause them to lose interest in what your post which will then eventually lead to your business losing followers.

• Be Funny- your business can be serious, but your content doesn’t need to be. Funny posts, images and videos will grab the user’s attention and will end up getting you a lot more shares.

• Ride the trend wave- a great way to create sharable and interesting social media content is to create posts around current trends, for example if a new show was released like the HBO series House of the Dragon, your business could make a post related to that.

With all of this in mind, let’s move onto the next point.

The Benefits of Social Media Marketing

Here if the list of benefits that businesses can benefit from social media marketing:

• Increased Brand Awareness- The benefit of increased brand awareness is very simple, if more people are aware of your brand, then more people will want to check out the services or products that your business provides which then leads to more people purchasing your services or products.

• More Inbound Traffic- Inbound traffic is traffic that originates from outside your network, this is the traffic you want as this is people who are looking for your product or service and have found your business. This is linked to point above regarding how social media marketing increases brand awareness, as the type of traffic you will get from increased brand awareness will be labelled as inbound traffic.

• Higher Conversion Rates- Conversion rates are how often someone purchases a product or service on your website because you are getting more inbound traffic which will be relevant to your business because people have had a look at your social media profile.

• Higher Brand Loyalty- To put it simply, people will be more loyal to a brand whose products or services they enjoy and a business who creates high quality content on social media. This means you will have a great balance of new visitors and returning visitors.

• Cost Effective- It is one of the most cost-effective methods of promoting your business because on most social media profiles, it is free to create a social media profile and to post. On top of this the paid methods of promotion that they do have such as Facebook who provide an option to boost posts for a small fee. If you do start using paid promotion on social media, start small rather than go all in immediately.

• Better Customer Satisfaction – Social media lets you communicate and network with different people, if you try your best to be as interactive as possible with your audience as possible, customers will be left more satisfied knowing they will receive a personalised response from the business rather than an automatic message. It shows you care about your customers because you want to interact with them

Creating a social media strategy

This is perhaps the most important element when it comes to social media marketing because, if you do not have any idea how you want to approach social media, your social media profile will become the equivalent of a headless chicken.

Not only do people not realise they importance of a social media strategy, but those who do seem to be locked in the mindset that they can only approach social media in one way and that is an unnecessary risk because they won’t change strategy if their current strategy, instead they may double down which will result in a waste of money for the business, and a waste of time for the employees.

Below are just 3 different social media strategies you can use in your social media marketing:

• Share educational content- No matter what industry you are in, educating your audience is always a good route to take as it proves to audience that you are an expert within the industry. People assume this because if you can teach people more about your industry then, you have enough expertise for your services or products to be of a high quality.

• Choose stories over promotion- you can link this strategy to sharing educational content as you can make your story educational. However, if you have the perfect story for your social media and it isn’t educational then still post it after all, everyone loves a good story, especially a story that can make the user feel nostalgic. Making the user feel nostalgic could help increase the chances of them purchasing your product or service.

• Produce diverse content types- You may be in the mindset that you can only post certain types of content on each social media platform, for example LinkedIn, you may think your content has to be serious and all about business or trying to promote something 24/7. Instagram as well, you may think you can only posts pictures and I can confirm myself, you do not need to post a picture to get a user’s attention. So rather than stick to 1 or 2 content types per platform, diversify and post multiple types of content on multiple types of social media.

Conclusion

Social media marketing is never static, it is always changing and that means your social media marketing should always be improving, and with this constant improvement means more people will be aware of your business due to your efforts on social media and with more people being aware of your business this means more potential opportunities for conversions.

Thank you for reading this article on how does social media marketing help businesses, if you enjoyed this article check out our articles on the top 5 mistakes people make with social media marketing and the good, the bad and the ugly of social media marketing.

WTBI is a creative, digital services consultancy based in Corby, Northamptonshire. Providing well-thought-out, digital strategies to solve difficult business problems for our clients. With technology changing at a high pace, we need to keep our clients engaged in reshaping their business through digital innovation and new opportunities.

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