Social Media Marketing: How important is it?

Social Media Marketing or Social Media Optimisation is becoming one of the largest forms of marketing for any business. It is now essential to market your brand across all social platforms and interact with your current client base and perspective clientele. Social Media has opened the door to ‘real-time’ interaction with consumers. Whether this be natural interaction, company or product reviews or consumer feedback – this is an area that can promote your brand effectively, or damage your brand depending on how you as a company responds.

The employment of internal Social Media Managers has now become the norm throughout most industries. Some brands have even gone as far as to hire specialists for each social platform; One for Facebook, One for Twitter etc.

With brands willing to invest this much into monitoring and driving social media marketing, we cannot see these avenues being a short lived marketing fad. If you are not utilising the social networks to your advantage you’re missing out. There is no argument here. Look at your competitors and how they are implementing Social Media Marketing, you may be surprised.

Facebook Advertising

How can Facebook Advertising benefit your business?

Facebook Advertising works in a couple of different ways. The most important part of this is to create a page for your business. The Facebook business page needs to attract an audience and in doing so attract potential customers and people who are interested in your product to then ‘like’ your page. The ‘likes’ are imperative to attract more prospective clients to find you and then create a great word of mouth.

How can businesses bring in more ‘likes’?

As a business it’s important to find relevant information about your product or service and then share interesting content (articles, videos etc.) which will gain your followers attention so then they not only like it but they want to share the information to their friends. This helps you as a business in it will further show your business page and information to a wider and wider audience.
Businesses need to be aware how important it is to consistently update their business profile with relevant information, whether it be articles based on your industry, exclusive offers or sales you’d like to promote or any changes to the day to day activity of how your business runs. Any very important posts you are able to pin to the very top of your business feed so to not miss any of your customer’s attention.
It’s also imperative to encourage activity on your business profile whether you do this by encouraging check ins, responding to any comments or posts from prospects or even creating promotions exclusive to Facebook.

Facebook Ads

The other way to advertise on Facebook is to create an Ad, this is an efficient way to bring traffic to your website and also to ensure prospects head to your Facebook page. The great thing about Facebook Ads is the targeting feature, this is to target the audience you most think will need or use your product in the future, for example targeting by Gender, relationship status, employment status, interests, education, age and what they ‘like’ on Facebook.

This is an amazing feature as there are 1.28 Billion active users in a month and it’s the second most visited site after google, the amount of prospects out there who are available are nearly limitless and as a business you wouldn’t want to miss out on the amount of prospects who are using Facebook daily.

In creating a Facebook Ad you are able to send prospects to either Facebook pages or profiles you admin or external websites (Business websites) you are also able to set objectives when creating your ad whether it’s for website conversion or page likes.

Another benefit in using Facebook as an advertising benefit is the ability to see your potential audience size (the amount of people potentially looking at your advert) This coupled with the added bonus of creating multiple ads with different logos, images, design makes it lucrative in seeing how many more prospects you can attract. The reason why creating different ads is important is to find out exactly what ads are the ones which are attracting the most visitors, once figured out you can cancel the ads not doing so well and put more energy into the ones which are working the best.

In creating a Facebook Ad you are creating more flexibility with your advertising, they are more flexible than Google Ads in how you can extend your character length for the description and also add images to the advertisement. This also extends to user engagement because facebook users are visiting the website not only to consume the information available but to also further share it and also create it. This helps loyalty to your business profile and also to your business which is clearly important in any marketing plan. Users are typically using facebook multiple times a day which can ensure people are engaging with your business page multiple times and increasing further awareness with their friends.