In this article you will discover how to use Social Media to market your business. Social media is no longer considered an option when it comes to marketing your business.

People are discussing your brand, products, and services online. If you’re not taking part in that conversation, you risk harm to your reputation and losing customers.

However, maybe you are a small business or entrepreneur who doesn’t believe they have many options. Your hands are tied because of a limited marketing budget.

Nevertheless, social media marketing is a powerful tool for reaching your target. In today’s article, you will discover how to use social media to market your business.

Consumers have an expectation that brands will interact with them through social media. If you are not using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube to speak directly to your target at every stage of the consumer life-cycle, you are missing out.

Today, social media marketing is a critical element for business success, reputation management, creating brand advocates, and driving qualified leads to your website.

Why Businesses Need Social Media

Without social media, your business is predetermined to fail. According to the Pew Research Center, “Nearly two-thirds of American adults (65%) use social networking sites.”

Furthermore, social media has fundamentally impacted every part of our lives: work, politics, dating, parenting, and more. Additionally, social media has revolutionized how people research businesses, brands, products, and services.

Without using social media, effectively marketing your business becomes a whole lot more cumbersome. Here are several ways that social media can help your business.

• Social Media Can Help You Reach a Wider Audience – Social media makes it easy to market your products and services to a very large audience. Nonetheless, the biggest benefit is the power to allow you to determine the type of audience and reaching your ideal customer.
• Social Media Can Give a Boost to Your Website’s SEO – Search engine algorithms not only consider on-page factors for determining your rank within search results. Search engines also analyze link shares and earned traffic to determine popularity, reliability, and relevance.
• Social Media Is an Effective Distribution Method – Not only can you easily distribute your content and marketing message to a large audience, the social shares of your fans and followers will help increase your organic and natural reach.
• Social Media Helps Grow Brand Loyalty – When you actively engage with customers and followers, you become more than a company trying to sell something. It shows you authentically care and relationships are not one-sided.
• Social Media Can Improve Your Customer Service – Social media makes it easy to monitor conversations about your business and responses to your content. You can quickly react to customer comments, questions, and concerns.
• Social Media Makes it Easier for New Customers to Find You – As you participate in conversations on Facebook and Twitter, your activity will encourage people to check out your website.
• Social Media Is Free – While most social sites do have a native advertising platform, social media websites themselves are free for business. You can’t really beat that when it comes to a return on investment.

Social Media Goals Businesses Should Measure

Before developing any social media marketing plan, a business must identify measurable goals.

In marketing, the phrase return on investment (ROI) is often casually tossed around. But, there are real questions about measuring your online activity’s impact on your business.

Without goals, there is no real way to understand if your social media marketing is performing well. Here are several suggested goals to get you started.

• Brand Awareness – Social media makes it easy to understand the extent to which consumers are familiar with the distinctive qualities or image of a business, product, or service. Follower counts reflect your brand’s potential reach. The actual reach of specific posts or tweets will show how many people were truly touched on any given day, week, or month. Monitoring social shares and mentions will inform you how many people are talking about your business, products, or services.
• Website Traffic – The next goal of social media marketing is driving traffic to your website. As one of the most effective content distribution methods, you can dramatically increase earned page views. Using your website analytics, you can track how many total visitors are coming from individual social platforms and the bounce rate. On a social site’s internal analytics, you have the power to evaluate the effectiveness of individual posts and post types.
• Visitor Loyalty – In marketing, the concept of effective frequency is very important. It is the number of times a consumer must be exposed to your message before they take an action. Since 98 percent of all website visitors are not yet ready to buy, bounce rates and repeat visits are very important data points to track. Using website analytics, you can segment out traffic from social websites, tracking page views, time on site, and visit frequency.
• Conversion Rates – Obviously, increased sales is where most business owners have the most interest. Regardless, conversion is a general term which you can apply to several metrics. For instance, converting visitors to leads is collecting personal information from giving access to gated content, e-book downloads, newsletter sign-ups, and more. Although, the ultimate conversion rates are sales with a purchase or quote request.

Today’s article introduced you to how to use social media to market your business. Stay tuned for future articles which will dive deeper into the subject, including how to create an effective social media marketing plan.

With over 2.3 billion active users, social media is a necessary and unavoidable part of marketing today.

What haven’t I covered yet that is important to you? If you would like to talk about how to use social media to market your business, or a related topic, please contact me.

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