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Why Social Media Marketing is so important for your business?

As social media has become increasingly mainstream, the focus on utilizing networks such as Twitter, Facebook, for online marketing has virtually exploded

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Anuj Sharma
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Digital marketing is a science and nowadays social media has become an essential way for marketing success in order to survive in current business world. There is no doubt that social media sites offer remarkable opportunity in terms of marketing and your business may not even be taken seriously without a powerful presence on the big social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and LinkedIn.

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With the current marketing scenario, it is advisable to invest the necessary time and resources for building and maintaining a premium social presence for your company . Winning social media marketing requires continuous commitment, focused strategy, deep industry insight, genuine user engagement and powerful content creation. Generating original, highly shareable content, genuinely and consistently interacting with industry influencers and building a significant social following could award you a reputation as a thought leader and will help in brand recognition for your company.

Social is the most powerful marketing channel because it is a vast, connected, and even sometimes intimate network. A Facebook post when you are reading a book is a recommendation for that author, a picture from the cricket game is a recommendation for the specific cricket team, a tweet about an article is a recommendation to read that content. Thus social media is full of content recommendations and people frequently receive and share recommendations on their own accord.

Let’s take the example of Facebook post. Let’s say when a brand posts some content on Facebook, it gets 20,000 impressions. What the pages/post admin do in response (like or comment) is first-generation engagement. Let’s say it gets a total of 60 likes and comments. Digging deeper, let’s assume the post gets a three percent click-through rate and, of that, a one percent conversion rate. Social marketers will then see and report that the social post generated 20,000 impressions, 60 engagements, 600 visits, and six conversions.

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Here’s what is likely to happen: 600 people visited from social and six converted, but 20 found something else on the website that interested them and shared it to their social networks. If each of those people average 200 followers, that’s another 4,000 potential people who saw content from the brand. With a similar CTR and conversion rate, that’s another 120 visits and another one or two conversions generated. Additionally, five people of the 120 visitors found something that interested them and shared it to their social networks of hundreds to thousands of people. And the cycle lives on. Because of that, social media’s impact on brands stretches far beyond just what brands post.

To truly gain control over social media performance, brands must understand the impact of the network and seize the value created beyond the first generation.

Also brands which take social media seriously proactively create powerful network sprawl. By using social media tools brands are able to capture how content naturally spreads through social networks, and they can begin to analyze and recognize which influencers have broad networks and which ones have tight networks (both types of influencers are important). They can also identify what type of content continues to exist through the network. In our above example, the content faded over time (300 visits in the first generation, 150 visits in the second). Some content gets stronger and spreads farther as time goes on — this is how content goes “viral.” Identifying how content spreads, especially as it pertains to business goals (visits and conversions) is an extremely powerful insight and can give you competitive edge over others.

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Five Easy tips for Social Media Marketing

1. Choose the right platform: There are various social media platforms, which means there are many options beyond Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. Take some time and analyze which platforms are best for your business and limit them to five max.

2.Use analytics and build a relationship: There are also hundreds of tools to analyze your social media campaign success and failures. Don’t just collect reports; read them, translate them and turn them into action. Identify your target audience and engage them. Get them involved and always promptly reply to outreach. As relationships are a two-way street, take out time to like the photos your fans share on their social media accounts. You can also give them a shout out on Twitter and Facebook. In this type of mutually beneficial relationship, your fans are more likely to share your content.

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3. Understand the buyer’s journey: As the retail is down and e-commerce is up, brands must spend some time to understand their potential customers’, analyze their decision chain, and what’s most important to them. Once you do that, you can come up with the right offer.

4. It’s all about timing: Plan and schedule your emails, tweets, status updates and blog posts at the right time—when you have a captive audience. You want to catch your audience not only when they’re checking their news feed or messages, but when they might have a few minutes to click through a link and check something out. These may be as short as just a few minutes window, but they’re important for reaching a busy audience.

5. Use images more: As they say a picture can say a thousand words than text alone. Photos perform better than videos, links and text on Facebook, Twitter or any other platform and attract more Likes, comments and click-throughs. The best pictures are self-explanatory, like infographics and charts and do not require a caption.

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Using social media to create customer loyalty

Apart from brand recognition through posts, twitter updates you can also drive customer loyalty via social media channels. Marketers have long been well aware that customer loyalty is established and re-established at each interaction a brand makes with customers. These interactions are essential in building and maintaining strong customer relationships. Loyal customers do not simply buy more or buy more frequently, they also make purchases without considering alternatives or competitors to your brand. Each interaction you have with your customers provides the opportunity to strengthen the satisfaction they have experienced with previous interactions, thus solidifying their loyalty to your brand. This is why social media provides the ideal platform for building a strong customer loyalty and also helps to drive more recommendations leading to higher conversion rates and more business sales.

Rather than always running new contests on social media platforms to collect new followers, think how you can use social media to reward your current loyal fan base. Contests are good for adding email addresses to your user base, but it is often far better to have a smaller, interactive fan base than a larger number of people with no enthusiasm for your brand.

Consider partnering with complementary brands or associate channel partners for giveaways and to share educational information and content. This increases exposure to potential customers and provides value that drives continued loyalty to your brand.

Conclusion

There are a wide variety of social resources and tools, which can streamline content creation—social sharing—and the promotion of your content on all your social networks, including HootSuite, Klout and Topsy. Start taking advantage of social media management tools; they can save you time and significantly increase the ROI of your content and your social reach. By knowing your audience, interacting with them on their terms, and making engagement easy and attractive, you can elevate your brand and even drive revenue.

Social media is here to stay, and its influence continues to rise. If you still have not gone social, now is the time to adapt and go Digital. Ignore the power of social media marketing at your own risk. Powerful content creation makes the foundation of high quality social media marketing. Engage a wide social audience to dramatically increase website traffic and social lead generation and conversion.

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