Apart from marketing on the air and online, social media platforms are a great place to reach out to your audience and promote your company! We tell you what is social media marketing and how it can benefit your company!
What is Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is making your company, products and services known throughout various social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. It is about getting more traffic and awareness of your company through these platforms. It can be done either through creating pages of your company at no cost or doing paid ads in social media. You will be promoting your company, and also are engaging in public relations as you will be directly interacting with your target audience.
The basic way to go about doing social media marketing is straightforward. To start off, you would need to create a page on a social media platform and customise it to suit your company’s image. This includes having the proper pictures, videos and the tone of your posts. Media, announcements and other comments need to be posted at timings where people are most active on social media so that you can get the maximum coverage, for example at 5-7pm where people would use their phones in their commute back home.
Once the pages are created it is time to get people to notice you. Get them to like and share the posts so that more people will know about it. Encourage people to talk about it so you can directly interact with them and build your brand image. Once you understand who is your support base and target audience, you can do paid ads where it appears on people’s newsfeed.
Benefits to your Company
Making your Brand and Company Known
Social media is a great way to get more people to know who you are and what your company does. Due to the nature of social media, you will be directly interacting with your target audience and getting them to like and share your posts. Simply by posting regularly encouraging, interaction and responding to comments will boost your company reputation where more people would recognise and even become loyal to your company. Furthermore, with more people liking and sharing your posts and media, it has the potential to reach even more new people. It will also drive more traffic to your main website and even convert to actual sales.
Improve your Search Engine Rankings on Google
Social media marketing can improve your search engine rankings indirectly. By reposting any articles or updates from your website to the social media page, you will be getting people to visit your website. With more people aware of your website and what you have to offer, they are more likely to link back to you. Since such backlinks are important for Google rankings, it will increase your ranking on the search engine.
Moreover, social media shares matter for ranking. The more shares your posts or articles get on social media, the more people are linking them to your company. This definitely influences your ranking as Google will take note how many people are linking and sharing your media.
Cost Effective Way to Marketing
Social media marketing cost little to nothing. You can create a company page at no cost in most of the social media platforms. Posting regularly does not incur any cost as well. If you need to create paid ads, it will not cost a bomb as compared to traditional marketing techniques. All the more you can focus on creating quality content for your audience.
Not only that, you will gain insights to how your page is doing. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram have free insights pages where they can tell you how people your posts have reached, the number of views and shares as well. The data is presented in simple, easy to understand charts so that you can easily how what does your audience like the most. With these insights, you can formulate your marketing campaign that caters to your audience interests.
Things to Take Note
Competition and Brand Tarnish
Being able to see what your competitors are up to is a double edged sword; while you can see their marketing strategy, they can see yours too. There is a risk that they would copy what you are doing on your page and divert your audience attention to them.
Same goes with comments and review section on your page. While it is good to leave the comment and review section on and talk to the people, people can also say bad things too. Since they are more likely to remember the bad points, bad reviews and comments can completely spoil your company image that you work so hard to build. Some aggressive competitors can go on a smear campaign to tarnish your image completely and drive your out from the competition.
To prevent your company from being tarnished, you need to be actively engaging your audience and ensuring that you are communicating in an appropriate tone. Take note of feedback and improve your products and services.
Manpower and Time Needed
Having a successful social marketing campaign can be good in the long run but in the short run, it can take a lot of time and need manpower. Time is needed to experiment what kinds of posts are receptive to your audience and for them to notice your company. Moreover, your company would need to have a writer to craft your posts and a social media manager to manage all the accounts (unless you can do it all yourself). It would take time to train up or extra cost to hire more people to your team.
Patience is needed to figure out what is the best strategy for the pages. Keep delivering quality content to your audience and post regularly as it will at least guarantee some form of engagement and potential for it to go viral. It is definitely a much better strategy than spamming your page with mindless posts as it will annoy your audience (and risk them unfollowing you)
If your company does not have a social media page, go and create one! It is an easy and effective way and to reach out to your audience and stay connected. Let us know what you think about social media marketing by leaving a comment below!