Social media marketing is a completely new, but vital part of online marketing that has taken off in the last few years. A brief definition of it is the process of increasing traffic to your site or gaining attention online though social media sites.
What are social media sites?
These types of sites are ones that rely on human interaction to work, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. They all require social actions that differ in the way they work such as Twitter gives you 140 characters max to say something or through a video or picture, whereas Facebook also you unlimited characters and the chance to add many photos at a time, join events or share updates.
What is social media important?
Social media marketing is very important to enhance and support search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts as once a page of a site or a link is found by social media users, it can then go ‘viral’ pointing many links back to the website which in turn is seen as a sign of popularity to the search genies and giving a boost in rankings to the said site.
Taking a look at the big three, as mentioned above Facebook, Twitter and YouTube we can have a look how each of these social media sites helps your marketing efforts.
Using Facebook is probably the easiest and most common social media site that people have heard of. Although Twitter has millions of users, many people only use Twitter to follow celebrities or directly for their business. The average Joe won’t always be found on Twitter, whereas with Facebook as it’s all about you, then a lot of people use it.
Both small and large businesses rely on Facebook to help promote offers they have at the time, as well as using it to post photos and videos. It’s also a great was to get people to interact as users can share updates from businesses, meaning that social media marketing is made all that much easier.
Having a page of Facebook is the way to go for businesses and encouraging people to like it through incentives such as competitions and prizes means that people are willing to tell others about your page, and then subsequently about your business.
Twitter as mentioned above is not as all consuming as Facebook because of the type of people using it, but if you are using Twitter to interact and make relationships and network then it is even more effective than Twitter. This is because people don’t have to trawl through a page to see what you are about. What you say and do is limited to the 140 characters so you have to be clear and concise in your actions and words, therefore making it easier to impress people (or annoy them!)
Twitter takes some hard work where social media marketing is concerned as you have to build up a flowing before you can even start to influence flowers and getting that following is the start of the battle. People won’t want to follow you if you constantly tweet promotional tweets or are always retweeting others messages. You have to make sure you are worthy of following and that what you say will engage people.
Once you have achieved this, then you rinse and repeat and keep writing what you have been writing that attracted your followers on the first place. Your message and business can then be spread across Twitter giving you invaluable links.
YouTube is also so commonly known that, like Twitter, you have to be very focused to successful use it in your social media marketing campaign. YouTube works more for educational websites and those selling things that could benefit from demonstrations. Using the right tags and descriptions also adds to the campaign so people can find your videos using the tags.
The videos have to be well made, and if you take the time to compile theses videos and people like what they see, it can take a matter of hours for your videos to go viral, again giving you national and even international exposure!