Just to be sure, if you are in any way, shape or form unclear as to the value of social media marketing, here are just 8 reasons why it needs to be part of your comprehensive online marketing plan. Maybe your current plan puts more emphasis on search engine marketing, maybe you’re currently focused on outreach— those are all well and good. But to really round things out and add a lot more value to your current online marketing campaign, social media marketing has to be part of the equation. It doesn’t have to take center stage, and it doesn’t have to be your overarching priority, but it has to be part of the total mix. Here are just 8 of the thousands of reasons why your company, regardless of its size, needs to do social media marketing.
Reason #1: Social media’s huge direct and viral reach
If you build a solid page on Facebook, you develop a direct reach. This means that a certain percentage of people who like your page will see your updates. While it is true that Facebook has been reducing the organic reach of Facebook page 15 recently, there’s a workaround to that. When people go to your page, you can instruct them to like your page and then click your page’s setting to show your updates first.
You might want to show a video that teaches people how to do this. You might even post an animated gif. Whatever you do, clue people in that they can fix their settings to see your updates first. Now, for people to take the time and bother to do this, you have to offer content that is really valuable. This puts the onus on you. There has to be real value on your page for them to want to do this. But you can increase your direct reach by instructing people.
Reason #2: Social media is habitual
While different demographics have shown softening or weakening of social media usage on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, this still doesn’t take away from the fact that a lot of people habitually use social media.
In fact, a lot of people do this the first thing in the morning. When they wake up, they go their mobile phone or tablet and check their updates. It can easily become a habit. This gives you a tremendous opportunity to get your content and brand in front of many interested eyeballs.
Reason #3: Target audiences use different content formats
The great thing about social media marketing is that you’re not restricted to just one content format. You’re not restricted to video, pictures, links, blog posts, text, or audio files. Instead, different platforms specialize in different formats. And when you create content for one platform, you can easily make different versions of it in different formats to spread out to other platforms.
For example, I write a blog post and post it on Facebook. I create a very attention-grabbing graphic for that blog post. So when I post it on my Facebook page, a preview of the image shows up and it grabs a lot of attention. People click on it, and they end up on my website. I can take that graphic and share it on Pinterest. I can take the text of my blog post or article and create a slideshow video out of it and share it on YouTube. I can also take the video and embed it in your blog post. I can strip different parts of the article or post itself and feed it into Twitter along with the link to the full post or article. Do you see how this works?
You get access to the different audiences of those different platforms by simply re-purposing or recycling the same content that you made for one platform and sharing those other formats on other platforms. This increases your potential reach.
Reason #4: Most social media platforms can be segmented
If you’ve ever been to Instagram, you know that when you see a picture, it usually has many different tags. If you’ve been on Twitter, you’d see that a lot of the hot tweets also have hashtags.
Those tags are very valuable. When you use a tag with your content, you are essentially categorizing your content. People use those tags to search for content.
This is a very powerful segmentation tool. People who are looking for cute Chihuahua puppies will use certain hashtags that are different from people looking for libertarian political posts. If you have a very tightly defined audience, social media platforms’ built-in segmentation tools and features can definitely help you.
You probably already know that huge audiences that are not very targeted are essentially worthless. Thanks to social media marketing’s segmentation features, you can get a smaller volume of people from many different platforms, but you can rest assured that these people are actually interested in whatever it is you are saying.
These segmentation tools go a long way in helping you build a very refined and well-qualified audience base. This, in turn, increases your likelihood of making a sale.
Reason #5: Sharing content on most platforms can be automated
Thanks to tools like Hootsuite and SocialOomph, you don’t have to worry about manually going to Facebook or Twitter and copying and pasting materials from a document or spending hours setting up your scheduled posts. You can automate your posts to publish up to six months on Facebook. This means that you can set up your Facebook account to post six to ten or more times every day, but you don’t have to babysit it because you have fed the content in.
The best part is that a lot of these automation tools use bulk feeds. Meaning, you can format your content in an Excel file and convert it to CSV and plug into these tools. You don’t have to input the materials one by one. Talk about saving a lot of time while also maximizing your reach.
