The Importance of Social Media

Although social media has actually been around for some time, it’s only in the last few years that companies have really realised its potential for business and it has quickly become a revolutionary way to engage with customers and create word of mouth marketing on a large scale.

Having a good social media presence on websites such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+, or a combination of those, is now considered an essential marketing tool for many companies, and certainly one of their most valuable. Here are just some of the ways social media marketing could benefit your company:

• Increases exposure of your products/services and brand
• Drives traffic to your website and blog
• Gain real insight into your business from live customer feedback
• Gives your customers a more personal touch and builds a loyal client base
• Excellent and cost effective source of lead generation
• Provides a new platform for customer service and ordering
• It gives you a platform to post company news, updates and photos
• Integrates your blog posts with social media giving your fan base plenty of regular, fresh and interesting information
• You can organise offers and competitions through your social media page that promote brand awareness and loyalty
• Increases trust in your company and brand credibility
• Brings you up the Google rankings

Why it’s important to do it right

Creating a great social media presence means regular, informative posts that will appeal to your customers and increase positive word of mouth marketing, so every post must be relevant and tailored to suit your company. Thousands of potential customers will see your social media pages before they have seen your website so it’s extremely important to get it right.

A good social media presence ultimately leads to potential customers visiting your website through links and SEO, so you will want to be sure your website is user friendly, all links are working correctly, everything is up to date and most importantly that it sells your company to its full potential. The first impressions of your website must be good, especially when promoting it through social media.

Here are some great examples of successful social media campaigns:

• Burberry secured over a million Facebook fans and a 10% increase in sales after photo-sharing images of people wearing the Burberry trench coat over the years, which is a great example of involving customers
• Ikea saw a 15% increase in worldwide sales after tagging pictures on Facebook in order to start a viral campaign to promote their showroom products
• Dunkin Donuts dramatically increased their Facebook contacts and brand awareness when they got followers to upload a photo of themselves holding a Coolatta to enter a competition
• When the Best Job in The World Campaign was launched in 2009, they received over 34,000 video applicants after the ad went viral via social networking sites

So you can see why social media is so important for businesses these days and luckily there are some great companies that can produce quality content for you and update your social media on a regular basis, as it can be time consuming to keep up a high standard of regular posts yourself.

Hit the right spot with social media users and you’ll be tapping into the most cost effective way of marketing today.