Social Media Marketing (SMM) is considered to be the next marketing gold rush. It is a unique way of promoting your business by making connections, developing relationships and interacting with existing or potential customers. If you are not sure why you should use social media marketing, then here are seven reasons to participate in the new marketing wave.
Exposure: Using Social media marketing strategies, you can expose your product and service to millions of social media users. Your website may take months before it is visible to your target audience, but you get instant visibility through social media networking. This helps in getting your message out faster and to more people.
Engagement: You can join the social media bandwagon including, social networks, blogs, wikis, and many more to connect and interact with your customers. Participation in online communities allows you to share your ideas, concerns and problems directly with your audience. Your social media marketing activities engage your customers into conversation, giving you the latest information about market trends, industry problems and customer feedback.
Traffic: When you are actively involved in social networking, loads of traffic from social media websites and other linking websites will come to your site. If your website is able to generate interest among social media users, then they will start tracking your website.
Links: A popular article on social networking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon or Reddit can get you a large number of quality links. It is easier, safer and economical to build links from social media than buying links from link farms. Bloggers and webmasters who are always looking for informative content may link back to your website.
Leads: Through SMM, you can join groups and communities relevant to your business, where you can interact and share your ideas with other group members. If your contribution is appreciated by members then you can have followers who are interested in knowing about your products, services and solutions.
Search Engine Rankings: Search engines give value to the quality links and relevant traffic coming to your website, while ranking your website. If you manage to develop popular link baits, you can spread your popularity virally, drawing huge traffic and inbound links. Your efforts in social media marketing can boost SEO efforts, leading to high ranking of your website on search engine result pages.
Cost Effectiveness: Social media marketing costs nothing other than your time, unless you are paying for a consultant. But the benefits from social media marketing often exceed the cost. It is a low-cost promotional method that gets you measurable results in terms of traffic, links and leads.