Today, many of us know social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Even, people in remote areas have at least heard of Facebook and Twitter, and probably they are using them regularly. But, a few years ago, it wasn’t a similar story.
Many of you may not be aware but the first social media site was born in 1997 when a website called Six Degrees was launched by CEO Andrew Weinreic. Later on, when the internet was available everywhere then MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter joined the club followed by others.
In a short span, it has become an integral part of our social life to connect with friends and family and you or me probably can’t imagine living without it now. In the last couple of year, social networks have been acknowledged by the business professionals who have become interested in finding a way to implement social media websites in their business.
Social media marketing (SMM) is a form of Internet marketing that utilizes social networking websites as a marketing tool. The goal of SMM is to produce content that users will share with their social network to help a company increase brand exposure and broaden customer reach. However, the easiest definitions for the social media marketing would be, “the use of social media channels to market a product or services to the right audience precisely”.
There is also some common misunderstanding about “social media”. Most of the people only think about Facebook and Twitter, but there are different websites that allow interaction among the users and the exchange of information through a variety of channels.
There are six types of social media platform have been established so far that includes, collaborative projects (Online magazines, wikis and Q&A), blogs and microblogs (Twitter and Tumblr), content communities (YouTube and Vine), social networking websites (Facebook and Google+), virtual game-worlds (World of Warcraft) and virtual social worlds or game-like design allows users to create virtual identity and to interact with other users through an online platform.
Marketing, as a discipline aimed at reaching consumers, was naturally the base for implementing social media in business. Having in mind the number of social media users, marketing professionals saw a great potential in establishing a relationship with the customers, as well as an opportunity for promotion.
- Brand Awareness: The number of users over social media networks is increasing day by day and possibly it could be a new channel for your brand’s voice. If you implement for your business, it gives you a chance to be easily accessible to new customers and your targeted audience.
- Improved target: By running a business, you know audiences very well but social media makes it much easier to know better than ever. Most of the social media platform has the analytics tools that provide better insights such as demographics and patterns of your customer behaviors. This allows you to better target your audience alongside it also helps you understand their specific needs.
- Connect to drive traffic locally and globally: We all know the power of social networking, and the people how are they connected to each other. Therefore, social media brings you the power to connect with your audience locally and globally as the way you like to build your community.
- Improve SEO: As you get more opportunities for connecting with the larger audiences it tends to more traffic to your website. One of the biggest benefits of social media marketing is that it improve the search ranking of your website.
- Lead generation: When you have your brand on social media you will have access to new customers, recent customers, and old customers as well. The message that you share on your social media channel can get some reaction from the user and every reaction can lead to a visit to your website. So, using social media marketing is a better way to generate leads.
- Building a healthy relationship with customers: Social Media Marketing is not just restrained to sales, but it improves the relationship with your customer. By engaging and solving their queries you can build a healthy relationship with the customers, which cannot be achieved by the traditional marketing.
Conclusion: Either you run product or service oriented company and target consumer or enterprises, social media marketing will play an important role to validate your brand and it can also help everything from new product growth to customer retention.
