In recent years, social media marketing has emerged as one of the most prominent, as well as one of the most promising marketing tools available to small businesses, which are able to use social media to advertise their services to a wide audience at a fairly low cost. Whilst this marketing is good for attracting attention to your company, maintaining an active presence on these websites is also useful in many other ways.
The word “social” is probably the most important part of social media marketing. The aim of this type of marketing is to get your clients involved with your business online, and in turn, you can use them to help to promote your brand to their friends or family. Customers can help to promote your company by simply showing their support and “liking” your page on Facebook, because every time they do this, it will be displayed (with a link back to your business page) on their timeline, and on the news feeds of some of their friends. This can help to draw extra attention to your brand name. Some of these friends may even click through to your page, and could end up “liking” it too, which will help you to spread your brand name even further. This kind of this marketing is the high-tech alternative to word-of-mouth advertising, except that you have the potential to reach thousands of people, rather than just a few. It is very important to maintain an active on your social media sites, in order to keep people interested, and to give them an increased amount of opportunities to “like” and share your information. Simple tricks such as posting things which people can easily identify with will increase the likelihood of them sharing it.
Many social media users will also use social media sites as a form of web directory, which they will check first if they want to find out the phone number, email address or the physical address of a business, rather than searching for the company’s official website, or looking for their contact details in a real phonebook. It is therefore very important to keep all your contact information up to date, so that people are easily able to use your business page to find out the information they need. Including a link to your official company website will also increase the flow of consumer traffic to that site.
Having a lot of different social media sites can also help to improve your search engine rankings, if you remember to include a link back to your company website on each. Search engines use complex algorithms to determine the position of each website in their search engine rankings, and one of the things which is taken into account are the number of links back to a website, so having a link back to your main website on each of your social media sites could actually help to improve your overall search engine ranking, and therefore improve the visibility of your company.