How Can Social Media Benefit Your Business?
First off, what is social media marketing? Broadly speaking, it is a way of promoting your website by interacting with users in order to drive traffic, get more links, and bring attention to your brand. Examples of social media channels are: blogs and microblogs such as Wordpress and Twitter, social networking applications such as FaceBook and LinkedIn, photo and video sharing sites such as Flickr and Youtube, and collaborative forums like Wikipedia, Digg, and Del.icio.us. An integral part of the collection of newly emerging technologies known as Web 2.0, social media tools address an increasingly important demand Internet users are placing on their experience - the ability to interact with each other and with the online space.
Advantages of Social Media Marketing
Have a small budget for online marketing? Social media marketing can be an incredibly low cost method of increasing your brand’s online presence. Because it creates a way for people to find your business, rather than the other way around, there is a huge opportunity to grow your brand organically and create a base of customers that is specifically interested in your business. Once you have a successful social media campaign in place, you can get a much higher ROI from other forms of marketing such as paid advertisements, because these efforts can then be more focused to the verticals appropriate to your business. A great example of a successful microblog is @DellOutlet - according to their blog they have generated over $2 million in sales on Twitter alone.
It does take a bit of time and strategy to implement a social media campaign however, so here are some considerations to get you started:
Address Your Site’s Target Market
You need to promote you site in a social media channel that is relevant to your business. If a client’s target audience is working moms, for example, you wouldn’t necessarily benefit from the Digg or Reddit communities. To interest users in your site and ensure that your brand is active in the appropriate networks, you would target the mom media sites such as Kirtsy and CafeMom. Similarly, if your brand is targeted towards doctors and medical professionals, it would be important to focus on those types of blogs and social communities. Social media marketing is above all about addressing users in a way that would actually benefit them.
Good Content Will Generate Buzz
If you can find a way to provide unique and interesting content that is new and valuable you can almost guarantee that people will want to blog about it and link to it. By publishing unique content via social media, you are creating link bait for other social sites, which can drive significant traffic that otherwise might never have found your website. You can also receive secondary traffic, through referrals from websites that liked what they saw on those social networks and linked to you. From an SEO perspective, more links equal better rankings in the search engines. This is very beneficial because obtaining links any other way can be extremely time consuming and expensive. Receiving links from efforts put into social media are often relevant to the site linking to you, permanent and natural which are all good things when it comes to better rankings and a better user experience. Getting involved in social media marketing will also help with your brand recognition. It is a great way to get a group of people within your target market to associate your name with your product or service. It really helps get your name out there.
Everyone Else is Doing It…
Lastly, it is important to get your website involved in social media marketing because most likely your competitors are doing it too. Social media marketing is a natural way to get more traffic, more links and stronger brand recognition. More and more businesses are taking advantage of social media networks to increase their presence in the online space. In order to successfully compete, you need to take advantage of this powerful marketing channel by joining the social media conversation.
To help you strategize, and to assist you with integrating your social media campaign with the rest of your online marketing efforts, check out The JAR Group’s social media services or email us directly at askjar@jargroup.com.
