Social media marketing is more important for businesses than ever before. Using social media has accelerated business, sustained companies, and upgraded the customer experience. Today, marketing has taken a giant stride with the help of social media platforms. It is now possible for marketers to reach out to a larger pool of customers, thereby creating a long-lasting experience for the consumer and leaving them with a good impression. To optimize the efficacy of social media marketing, social media tools must be used correctly.
The Rise of Social Media Marketing
Social media has been a fast-growing trend used by marketers and individuals for years now. Social media is a platform for interconnectivity between people made possible through technology; it’s where social networking occurs, and the various sites aid the transfer of information between individuals — buyers and sellers included. Statistics show that people spend a lot of time on the internet using different social platforms and social media users increase every second.
Statistics on social media marketing also reveal that the number of active users in 2015 amounted to about 2.206 billion globally. In 2016, a report on internet users revealed that approximately 88.5% of America’s population alone uses social platforms.
Research shows that to understand social media marketing, the factors that influence customer behavior related to social media must be studied.
Everyone’s Going Social – Use Social Media Marketing to Reach Them
That fact that social media is undoubtedly a part of almost everybody’s everyday life makes it the perfect tool to reach any market segment you may be after. Social media marketing makes use of social media sites to raise visibility, and promotes products and services. You can make use of blogs, online videos, photo sharing, posts on social networking sites, and podcasts to reach out to a large, but usually specific, audience.
Social media marketing has contributed significantly to business growth through the use of different social media platforms. Marketers have been provided the opportunity to receive feedback on their brand, and to also give a rapid response to the needs and complaints of their customers. It has also provided business owners an avenue to monitor their business growth, sustain their brand identity, and attract prospective clients.
Through the use of social media, companies keep customers informed on necessary information, they upload and update postings, videos, news, and events, and they announce discounts and promotions on their accounts and pages on various social sites.
In addition to this, there are specific areas where social media marketing offers a great advantage to businesses. For example, the use of social media has come to be recognized as a strategy for both established and growing businesses to help increase customer loyalty to a brand. It is easier for sellers to use the feedback they receive to improve the customer experience, and advance their brand or product. It is also easy to keep an eye on the competition and work to meet the market gaps left by the other companies in the same field.
Types of Social Media
- Social networking
- Wikis
- Photo-sharing
- Blogs
- Business networking
- Collaborative tools
- Video sharing
- Social bookmarking or tagging
Benefits of Social Media Marketing For Business
Some of the benefits of using social media for business include, but are not limited to:
- The ability to reach a larger audience without having to pay advertisement fees
- It provides marketers with useful information needed to target a specific audience
- It serves as a channel of connectivity between buyers and sellers
- It gives a boost to traditional marketing, thus allowing the brand to reach a larger audience
- It increases the page rank of a brand, thereby off-shooting it to the search engine
6 Helpful Tools for Social Media Marketing
For growing and sustaining businesses, social media is indispensable in the hands of business owners and marketers.
Social media tools are the various tools or software that help in the maximization and effective use of various social media. Some of these tools are free; some offer free trials of varying lengths, then require paid subscriptions. Some of the most effective social media tools that optimize work flow with ease are:
- Buffer: It’s a well-known media tool among social-media marketers, and it serves as an access point to all of one’s functioning social platforms. It saves a lot of time, because this tool allows for your post to be published on your other social platforms, thereby driving traffic. It works with Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+ and so on.
- Canva: Canva is a visual tool that beautifies posts. Society has come to terms with the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. Canva as a social-media tool provides users with an array of choices to design graphics with different colors and fonts. It gives marketers the ability to work with diverse photographs and Images to draw client attention. Hence as a marketing tool, Canva provides users the opportunity to create, edit, and modify pictures to suit their purpose — and their audience tastes — for effective marketing to take place.
- Babbly: It’s another remarkable social media tool one cannot do without. It’s a give-and-take social media tool. In other words, when you share a post, it gets shared automatically.It has been a useful way of boosting content and making it go viral. With Babbly, you can control your post to determine what goes public and when. With this, one can reach a set target and maximize time.
- CYFE: It is a monitoring and sharing tool. Businesses today spend up to 80% of their time dealing with data — that’s monitoring, collecting, analyzing and reporting data. This has been made easy through the use of Cyfe, as it provides the opportunity to manage a large pool of information easily within a reasonable time-frame to perform the necessary actions.
- Secure My Social: It’s a social media security tool that scans subscribers’ use of the social media, warning them about activities that might expose them to harm. It addresses risk through the warning.
- Google Trends: Google Trends is an analytical tool that tracks engagement. It helps you discover the conversation or topic driving traffic. With it, every time your keyword is mentioned on any forum sites or blogs, it alerts you. Best of all, it’s free!
Social Media Marketing Trend – from Text to Visual
Trend movement in social media invariably influences the shift in social media marketing. People are becoming smarter with every update of social media software. They strive to optimize the new use of social media platforms by using available social media tools. To stay relevant in business, it’s important to keep up with new digital trends.
According to a 2016 trend report, some of the latest trends have seen a sharp shift from text to visual. Visual interaction has taken center stage, with virtual reality and simulated reality creating experiences for audiences and consumers.
Another growing trend is towards reality, the trend of presenting an event just the way it is via live streaming. Presenting an event in a transparent form catches the attention of the audience more.
Social Media Marketing Can be Transformative
Social media marketing today not only complements traditional advertising, it has also transformed marketing to be customer-centered, with the help of various tools such as Buffer, Canva, Babbly, Cyfe, Secure My Social, and Google Trends.
Change in social media moves fast, and that’s why social media marketing has to stay current and up-to-date.
Do you have a favorite tool among the 6 above? How about another tool you rely on? Jump on in and comment below!
