Hisham Sarwar
According to the Pew Research Center, the percentages of U.S. internet users who use social media sites online or on mobile are as follows:
- YouTube: 73%
- Facebook: 68%
- Twitter: 24%
- LinkedIn: 25%
- Instagram: 35%
- Pinterest: 29%
- Snapchat: 27%
Let’s take a look at 6 key benefits of social media marketing.
- 1. Increase In Brand Awareness
- 2. Increase In Website Traffic
- 3. More Conversion Rate
- 4. Increase In Brand Loyalty
- 5. The Most Cost-Effective Marketing Solution
- 6. SEO
Social media marketing helps in increasing brand awareness and inbound traffic. Social media marketing helps you generate conversions about your product and services when you tell your brand story. A brand story highlights the business mission and its targeted audience. Creating good branding means building customer loyalty and retaining them as a long-term prospect to buy your product and services.
Nowadays, the biggest impact of social media is on SEO. If there is good engagement and shares on a blog post, it encourages search engines, Google primarily to index your business keywords better.
To better understand the benefits of social media marketing, let’s discuss some stats related to Facebook and Facebook-owned companies first.
“I want to discuss Facebook because it currently boasts over 2.6 billion users. This number is significantly higher than the combined number of cars on the roads and planes in the skies all over the planet Earth.”
Instagram, a Facebook-owned company has already gained huge popularity in recent years, especially among teens and brands. Over 1 billion users use Instagram every month. About 500 million people use Instagram stories daily. Social media marketing on Instagram has huge benefits. If you want to grow your YouTube channel, check out Raffiti media.
WhatsApp, also owned by Facebook is the people’s number one choice for instant messaging, and video calling services. 2 billion users use WhatsApp and around 1.6 billion users use the app monthly, sending over 65 billion messages daily.
The above stats mean — if you get the strategy right focusing on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp platforms, you can build a great future through digital marketing.
Advantages of using social media for business marketing
Social media marketing does not necessarily mean paid advertisements. If you know how to leverage the power of Facebook and its companies, use LinkedIn and YouTube, and you give yourself a huge chance of promoting your business organically.
Let’s take a look at the benefits of using different platforms for social media marketing.
1- Facebook:
As a business, you can acquire new clients using Facebook by building a nice profile and creating a page. A good profile with huge connections can help you in achieving goals faster but this doesn’t happen overnight. Facebook allows you to add up to 5,000 friends and get unlimited followers on your Facebook profile. By creating a page from your profile, you can reach out to a huge number of potential customers.
When you post something related to your business on your Facebook page the next step is to share it on your profile timeline and ask your friends and followers to share the post on to their walls. I have gained huge engagement on many Page posts using this formula. Take a look at engagement from the following pictures.
Success on Facebook predominantly lies with building profile connections – friends and followers and leveraging that section to promote your page content. Now, of course, the content has to be worth sharable in the first place in for your connections to share on their timeline.
Notice the followers on my profile. They kept accumulating once I added 5000 friends and promoted good, sharable content on my timeline with a call to action. A good call to action encourages the connections to share your content to their timeline — increasing post engagement and followers.
2- Instagram:
Instagram is the new social media king. Just about 8 months ago, it dethroned Facebook as the most preferred social media platform.
It is easier to grow your brand organically on Instagram. By using the power of #hashtags that are popular and frequently searched by people all over the world, your content gets a fair bit of exposure. Also, Instagram stories and direct DM are some of the best ways of creating awareness about your product and service.
“To learn a complete Instagram marketing strategy, click here“. Hisham Sarwar
3- LinkedIn:
Gary Vaynerchuk says LinkedIn is the best social media platform to market your business. It has by far the best reach as compared to other platforms. For B2B, LinkedIn marketing wins the race by a long way.
LinkedIn is built for networking. You can promote your brand by creating great content related to your industry and using hashtags to promote the content.
On LinkedIn, you also gain access to hiring managers and recruiters and use the platform as a research tool. LinkedIn has an amazing job board for new opportunities and you can gain social proof for your brand as your connections can recommend and endorse you. As a brand, you can follow other companies and introduce yourself through niche targeting.
If you want to learn secrets to selling on LinkedIn and market your brand. Click here to attend the master class.
4- YouTube:
The number 1 platform for videos. YouTube is owned by Google, one of the biggest tech companies. YouTube has 2 billion users. About 15% of the site’s traffic comes from the U.S. People. upload 500 hours of video every minute and each visitor spends around 11m, 24s per day on average.
By creating your channel on YouTube, you can upload videos inside different playlists and get your channel monetized through Google Adsense.
Just like a huge presence on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, I have a good presence on YouTube too with a verified account that helps me in promoting my brand organically without paying a single dime.
Conclusion:
Social media is the best way of promoting your business and if you do it correctly, the chances of maximum outreach just double. All social media accounts require is consistency and populating your timelines with regular branded content.
If you have any queries regarding social marketing, you can contact me.
