Why Social media marketing is important for business

by socialmedianewsadvice

It is the process of online marketing through social media sites likes, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube etc. social media marketing is able to connect and interact in a much more personalised and dynamic level than through traditional marketing. Some examples of social media marketing are having a blog, a Facebook fan page, a Twitter account. It not only give the entrepreneur the space to spread their message but they also provide a place to interact with the customers.

Optimizing your social media marketing efforts involves everything from making sure your profiles have the right keywords (which includes your brand, product or service names), to ensuring the content that you are placing out into the social media communities.

If a cookie-cutter approach to social media marketing did exist, the process would be more of a commodity, much as building websites has become. Any business can buy a domain name and hosting from companies such as GoDaddy .com and get a website up and running with little effort. Companies such as GoDaddy.corn have made building websites a commodity by giving businesses easy-to-use options such as website templates in which they just choose a color, add a little content and a logo, and, “pool,” they are now in business online.

Effective social media marketing involves research, strategy, planning, and measuring. The results of that research will vary for each company, so the most effective social media platforms and social marketing plans will vary, too. Although the media hypes what’s hot and what’s not when it comes to successful social media marketing tactics, companies need to focus on specifically designing their own social media marketing strategy. Doing something just because the competition is doing it is not a wise strategy.

Just because your competition has a blog does not mean you need to develop one right away. You might find that mimicking your competitors’ social media marketing efforts does not result in the same gains (or the same pitfalls) for your company. If you are focused on competing with your competitors, your real audience might be elsewhere talking about your company—and you will miss it.

Although you might have certain markets in common with your competition, your market research will likely show you that your audiences are different. For example, if your company sells tools primarily to female buyers, you wouldn’t want to place your social media marketing efforts on sites that males more commonly use—even if your competitors are doing that. It would be a complete waste of time and money. You might not even know your audience’s demographics or what social media sites they frequent yet, so do your research first and then formulate a plan.

Without doing research, and instead just following the sound of someone else’s beating drum, you are blindly applying marketing tactics without a sound marketing strategy. Most important, just because your competitors are doing it doesn’t mean you need to do it, too. No two businesses are alike, even if they are competing for nearly the same market share.

Marketers are held accountable for the marketing dollars they spend. When it comes to social media, marketers get a little edgy because it’s difficult to determine the return on investment (ROI) of social media marketing. People have different opinions of what should be measured and how it should be measured; there’s no standard way for every business. As with social media strategy, social media measurement differs for each company.