Dont Underestimate The Power of Social Media Marketing

I believe that the majority of people today underestimate the power of Social Media and how it can be a successful tool in marketing yourself and/or your business. Social Media allows businesses to target their audience in a fun, easy going and casual but engaging type of atmosphere. More businesses should take advantage of this innovative opportunity in order to better market themselves and connect with their consumers on another level. Using Social Media to market yourself or your business can be tricky. Make sure you understand that every “friend” “like” and “follow” are just simply clicks of the mouse for most online users. Just because someone follows you doesn’t mean they automatically become fan or consumer of your online presence. If you want real attention fight for it, ensure your audience that you want to be heard; there are many effective ways to use social media in order to do this successfully.

Social networks were designed to make it easy and fun for people to interact. This means that you should use your social media platforms to build important relationships with your consumers that will help market your business. You should constantly be looking for other social media sites similar to yours who have a large following who are a good fit for your product or services. Usually sites like this come from bloggers, authors, vloggers or columnists in the mainstream media who like to share engaging, creative and favored content with their followers. This allows your smaller business to gain notoriety in the online world by simply “making friends” and sharing content.

Blogging is becoming a growing trend day after day allowing bloggers to have a very big impact in the online advertising world. People are starting to get their news, information, resources and references from the web and most people happen to stumble upon blogs when searching for specific information. One thing bloggers are using to their advantage that can also help to market your company is paid advertising, product placement and advertorials. 72% of bloggers are actually getting paid by companies for advertising space on their site, that’s a pretty high percentage. Also put into consideration that more people today trust references and referrals from personalized online blogs then traditional advertising (print, radio and broadcast) because it gives them a secure sense of personal outreach and trust in the advertising posted on your site. Put two and two together and you have the perfect source for marketing your business/company/website in this type of social media space. 

Synchronizing your online content and activity across all social media platforms is also a great way to market your business quickly and effectively. When doing this you are automatically able to reach multiple platforms by simply posting the content on one channel (twitter, facebook, instagram, pinterest etc.)

You should also be aware of your timing when using social media. For instance, if you’re main line of communication and engagement with your audience is Twitter, it would be useful to know that “tweeting primetime” is during the middle of the work day. Don’t waste your time in posting important information or content during any other hours, be pro-active and reach the maximum amount of people possible. If you’re a reporter for the morning news at your local station and post videos to twitter mostly in the am, make sure you re-tweet those stories during primetime so that more people are able to engage in your news stories and coverage.

Viral videos are another way that have a big impact on the social media world and can be effective in marketing your business. Creating a video at home and allowing it to go viral using social media placement online involves little time commitment and zero involvement of studio space, talent or spokespeople; making each hit on the video an increase in possible revenue since you spent close to nothing on advertising the product.  Posting a video on any social media platform, especially YouTube gives it a pretty good chance in going viral due to the hundreds of thousands of online users constantly sharing and delivering content across multiple platforms. Viral videos extend the life of your marketing abilities and allow your product or business to be exposed to not only one targeted audience but many different types of people that you probably wouldn’t have considered targeting with traditional media.