Why Your Business Needs a Social Media Strategy

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Social media is becoming increasingly important in marketing yourself and your business, and of course, being noticed by search engines. 78% of companies have dedicated social media teams, proving that the world is truly catching on to the importance of social media marketing in 2015.

The 21st-century version of ‘Word of Mouth’, social shares and likes are more than just a virtual thumbs up in terms of increasing interest in your website. Hubspot report that “92% of marketers agree that social media is important for their business, up from 86% in 2013.” The same percentage report that social media efforts have increased their business exposure, but aside from brand recognition, what else can social media do for you?

Conversion rates

When customers browse online, it can be easy to get distracted by the multiple faceless companies all offering similar services and products. Forbes report that “Social media is a place where brands can act like people do, and this is important because people like doing business with other people; not with companies.” Social media is all pervasive and is a great way for smaller sized businesses to play against the big names, and use clever marketing strategy such as humour or competition to stand out from the crowd.

One of the most important factors to remember with social media is that for most users it is first and foremost personal in nature, even with b2b buying. Take a look at this great infographic from Business 2 Community credited to ExecutiveBoard.com which shows that emotions matter even more than logic and reason. How much more so can we expect this in B2C cases? The more humanised you can become, the more likely you are to have successful sales results.

Social logins are also a great touch, as many individuals no longer want to remember multiple logins and passwords and prefer the ease of signing in through social media. In fact, 86% of users report being bothered by a website which doesn’t offer this. It goes without saying that conversion rates depend highly on customers sticking around past the sign in page (see this powerful statistic from ConversionXL).

Diversifying Content

As well as increasing conversion rates, social media involvement is a great way of managing content creation and dissemination. Take the advice of Jason DeMers from AudienceBloom who recommends you “Build a cross-channel strategy that puts content into different formats.” Simply put, this means creating content which can be used many different ways. Perhaps you write an excellent blog post. You could send it in newsletter format, create interest with social media statuses, perhaps leak a teaser video through YouTube, or create some buzz with a relevant competition or giveaway. In this way, DeMers believes you should always ask about a piece of new content, “How many different ways can I format all or part of this content to connect with my audience and expand my reach?”

Crosslinking your content can also improve your rankings in the search engines, as this stat from Hubspot works to prove. “More than 58% of marketers who have been using social media for one year or longer improved search engine rankings.”

There’s little doubt that making the effort to create dynamic social media content and improve your social media strategy has a positive effect on your business. And there are even ways you can minimise the time investment it takes too. “Over 84% of participants found that increased traffic occurred with as little as 6 hours per week invested in social media marketing.”

It can help to look at comparison websites like Top 10 Best Website Builders where you will be able to compare the social media opportunities each web builder offers, and how they can save you time in both development and deployment of marketing strategy.