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Have you embraced the use of social media? It is 2021. Social media marketing has been the ripe fruit of social media for businesses.
According to a report of social media usage released by Statista:
In 2020, over 3.6 billion people were using social media worldwide(a global rate of 49 percent.), a number projected to increase to almost 4.41 billion in 2025.
On average, internet users spend 144 minutes per day on social media.
Facebook was the first social network to surpass one billion registered accounts and currently boasts approximately 2.5 billion monthly active users, making it the most popular social network worldwide.
In June 2020, the top social media apps in the Apple App Store included mobile messaging apps WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and the ever-popular app version of Facebook.
In 2021, Social networking sites are estimated to reach 3.78 billion users. These figures are still expected to grow as mobile device usage, and mobile social networks increasingly gain traction in previously underserved markets.
The above statistics communicate how important it is to tap into the numbers on social media and adopt social media marketing.
Social media marketing refers to social media platforms exercise to bond with clients to put your product, boost sales, and increase website traffic. Social media marketing involves posting relevant content like live videos, texts, prerecorded videos, images, GIFs, and animations on all your social media engagement platforms, talking to your audience, giving an ear to their complaints, and addressing their concerns.
The social media platforms used are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Youtube, Snapchat, and WhatsApp. Different business brands use social media for different purposes, i.e., to get traffic to their websites, to generate sales, to get people’s views about a product and its performance, to get to a target number of audience and engage with them, and also to engage with potential consumers of the product or service.
Tips for social media marketing
Create a plan - What do you hope to achieve by using social media marketing? Different business brands have different goals and plans; therefore, before you plan your social media marketing journey, make sure you have a plan/goal of what you want to achieve. For example, your goal could be brand awareness, generating more sales, attracting more traffic.
Consistency in posting - Your source of information and point of marketing must be consistent. With over 3 billion users, your audience needs to hear from you regularly, or they will move on quickly from you and search for a new provider.
Consistent engagement with your audience - It goes beyond sharing and posting your information. Go ahead and give your strategy a personified touch by engaging with the responses and queries from your audience. It is proof that you are actually watching and are listening. Engagement also helps you to know what people are thinking about your product and where to adjust accordingly.
Monitor your performance - Monitoring your performance is vital for your business because it helps you know where you need to improve. Monitoring performance also helps you know whether you are soon reaching your audience's target number and whether they are the right people. You can choose to do it manually or use social media analytic tools like Buffer to achieve this.
Making use of social media Ads - Social media advertising is a cheat code on social media marketing. It is effective. You can tweak the ads to address exactly what you want from social media - following, clicks, responses, engagements. Social media ads can also target your preferred audience that is likely to get more interested in your products or services, thus saving your time and getting the right people.
Benefits of social media marketing
According to a CoSchedule post by Brady Dukart, 97% of marketers are using social media. In comparison, 78% of salespeople outsell their peers by using social media for their business. He further says that the benefits of using social media to market go further beyond increasing sales and making more purchases.
1. Promotes brand awareness
The numbers on social media say that you are reaching out to more people via social media marketing than any other form of marketing. Owing to functions like share, like, follow, retweet on social media, your posts are bound to end on the feed of more than your target audience.
2. Drives traffic to your website.
Social media marketing is a perfect avenue to increase and drive traffic to your business website. Consistent sharing of your product, which links to your website, provokes your audience to interact with every piece of information shared, link to the site inclusive.
This takes a bit of time, especially when using organic marketing to attract traffic, while paid advertising on social media appears to be expensive. On the other hand, organic traffic is free but requires sharing consistently, reply to comments, engage with other people’s posts, like and comment on them so that your post can be treated the same by those very people.
Build a landing page while at it, and capture your visitors' details so you can be able to share information easily and directly. A landing page is one of the most effective ways to quickly capture a visitor’s information and put them on the path to discovering and purchasing your product or service. With the help of landing pages, you can promote offerings such as eBooks, whitepapers, checklists, special discounts, or encourage a visitor to subscribe to email updates from your site.
Related: The Best Landing Page Software
3. Brand Growth
To get your brand known to people, you ought to build a profile worthy of the share, like, retweet, comment, and follow functions; a brand that your audience can proudly relate with and easily get their friends involved with .need to build your brand recognition. From the engagement coming from the awareness, you will know what they want from your brand, emphasize loyalty to your customers, and finally offer the best customer care to keep your audience excited. They are likely to recommend their friends for your product.
Promoting content about your product is also another powerful way to market your products online; however, your content should be relevant to the product and should be more visual as compared to mere texts because visuals attract more attention than texts; communicate with your clients to know what they love so that if you are to promote a product, it is in line with what your audience wants otherwise it would be a waste of time if you promoted something that is contracted to their wishes and interests thus you won’t enjoy the benefits of social media marketing.
4. Engagement
You get to reach a broad audience to increase the number of post engagements or Page Likes, increase attendance at your event, or encourage people to claim a special offer through social media marketing.
This can be achieved by responding in kind to any activity on your social media content. Clients trust engaging brands a lot more because they get to show how much authority they have in a particular field.
5. Conversions and sales
Social media marketing will help you get people who are now paying attention and ready to take a specific action on your website (like subscribe to your list or buy your product), with your app, or on Facebook Messenger.
Share with products they are interested in, and they will reach out about making a purchase.
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