Social media is vital to your business
There is no longer a debate about the importance of social media.
Look at the 2018 social media usage figures.
Over 60% of Australians are Facebook users, and 83% of those users access Facebook daily.
In the US, 78% of 18- to 24-year-olds use Snapchat, and a sizeable majority of these users (71%) visit the platform multiple times per day.
Similarly, 71% of Americans in this age group now use Instagram and close to half (45%) are Twitter users.
Engage with your ideal customers on their social media platform of choice
Business Benefits of Social Media
There are genuine business benefits to the use of social media that savvy owners and managers understand.
- Social media allows customers who don’t know your brand to discover you when they are searching for information about products like yours.
- Social media allows you to directly reach out and engage users with new information that will help them as they are researching solutions
- Social media allows you to connect with your customers on a minimal marketing budget
- Social media is a relatively level playing field where small players have the same media access as do the large multi-national corporations
- Listening to social media gives you valuable insights into the needs of the market, allowing you to improve your products and services
- Engaging regularly with customers on social marketing builds your brand’s loyalty while publically and proactively dealing with any issues, promotes healthier customer trust and satisfaction levels
- Social media advertising allows you to target demographic and social groups specifically
- Retargetting or followup advertising is built into many social platforms enabling you to re-engage with prospects
- Well focussed social media gets you noticed widely and can result in valuable mainstream media coverage at little or no cost
- Social media activity and informative posts establish your credibility and reinforces your authority
Social Media Enhances SEO & Increases Traffic
Google says that it does not use social media to calculate search rankings. Even if this is true, search engines do use site visits, links and backlinks to generate rankings and social sharing of your content encourages all of these.
So what do you need to do to leverage social media?
- Create content that is useful and informative to new visitors and helps retain existing customers
- Keep posts short and to the point, so the user can absorb your message quickly
- Headlines and images are essential to get attention and encourage sharing
- Add keywords that describe your product or offering to hashtags, captions, links, image names and <ALT> tags
- Create an action for the user to take. Words like “check out”, “follow”, “like”, “retweet” etc. improve user engagement
- Offer some form of benefit or free service for users who engage
All of these small things will amplify your message and grow your social media following which, in turn, will encourage more people to your website and share your blog and article content.
Google does notice web traffic and links, and so your search ranking will improve.
But remember that Google is not the only search engine. Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms have their own search functions, and these are gaining in power and popularity.
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