Social Media Opinion South Africa

How social media marketing helps in boosting your business

The term "social media " has entered within the boundaries of fame and recognition in the past few years, but it has revolutionised the concept of digital marketing by bringing in loads of benefits for business owners.

The evolution of diverse social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn has forced the businesses to revise their online marketing efforts for boosting their business share to a significant level. It has also proven to be an invaluable tool for gathering the unbiased and raw feedback of the customers.

The effective use of the power and fame of social media platforms helps in promoting your business to a wider spectrum of audience. However, determining what social media truly means and how effective social media marketing strategies help in increasing your online brand awareness, needs a proper understanding of the techniques involved in spreading your online existence among your target audience.

How social media marketing helps in boosting your business

Real social media marketing requires dedication

If you are new to social media marketing, you might think that posting a few blog posts regularly, random status updates and a good number of "likes" and "followers" are going to boost your business growth majestically. However, the fact is that the complete business growth through social media marketing requires dedication and real planning.

Professional social media marketers know that to harness the complete power of social media, it is important to include a perfect blend of:

    • Sharing your relevant message

    • Listening to your audience

    • Enabling others for sharing your messages

But what are these relevant messages and how sharing these message helps in boosting our website revenue? These relevant messages are nothing but the content, which has grown in significance in the last few years owing to the changes introduced by Google in its search engine algorithm.

For successful and fruitful social media marketing, high quality and compelling content should be shared on behalf of your company and its services. Great content gets audiences to share and this sharing helps in expanding your audience range to a complete new world of potential friends, fans and customers.

If you own a large business, or you are a lone entrepreneur, social media marketing could be the most powerful and inexpensive marketing tool in your arsenal for developing authority and trust that eventually grow your business exponentially. Here are five important social media hacks that helps you in saving your time and gaining more exposure, followers, elevated conversion rates, and improved user engagement rate.

How social media marketing helps in boosting your business

1. Know the latest and hottest

If you know what the latest trends relevant to your niche are and you post content that is latest and important for your customers, you will surely provide your target audience a reason to read your posts over social media platforms, which indirectly increases traffic on your website. One of the tools that helps you in keeping a track on the new and trending approach related to your business is uvrx.com, which is powered by custom Google search and it throws the results for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumbler, and other popular platforms.

Another such tool is Social-searcher.com, which allow the users to evaluate how their selected keywords are being treated by the different social media networks. It also offers analytics data, sentiments associated with keywords, and the posts that are doing well.

How social media marketing helps in boosting your business

2. Adopt absolute approach to your marketing tactic

As a social media marketer, you must be aware of your product, its pricing, promotions, and placement. However, it is vital for you to realise the trove of important information in your customer's feedback, which remains hidden from the eyes of an inexperienced social media marketer and it includes everything from comments, posts, reviews, etc.

It could get complicated sometimes when we mix different products and localities, but it is important to analyse this data and to share it in a readable and digestible format with others in your organisation, as it will help you in executing the right marketing plan attuned as per the customer's needs. Another advantage of keeping your customers busy over social media sites is the speed with which you can test your mistakes and plan your imminent social media marketing strategies to get better results in future.

3. Expand your networks

Reaching subscribers, followers, and friends is essential for developing an enjoyable and successful social media campaign. You can find new customers over these social sites by running paid advertisements or you can also promote your blogs or make offers.

Another method is to tap the LinkedIn premium subscriptions that give you the opportunity to reach the potential clients via InMail. A genuinely basic, but often ignored hack to drive more subscribers towards your Facebook business page, is to instantly direct message the link to the new followers on Twitter. Similar cross-fertilising and creative techniques should be implemented on all other social media platforms for capturing the interest of your target audience.

How social media marketing helps in boosting your business

4. Save your valuable time

No matter whether you are running an enterprise level social media operation or a one man show with data being fed into customer relationship management, you must have to automate certain systems because if you don't do so, these will tend to become chores that you will definitely want to avoid, thereby limiting your effectiveness.

Some of the activities which you can automate engrosses posting updates across different platforms, and uploading social media content into remote storage. This will help in saving you extra time and you can utilise this time to plan new strategies for ensuring success of your business through social media marketing.

5. Embrace the changes and be trendy

When a social media website modifies or changes its guidelines, you will be granted with two options. Either you can adapt the change to extract the maximum benefit for your business, or you simply give up. For example, LinkedIn has recently introduced improvements like the ability to block profiles and unwanted messages.

On the other hand, a recent Facebook update has announced to prohibit informing the results of contest winners through Facebook. These modifications have the clear advantage of famous LinkedIn groups that have to deal with loads of spam now.

Some other opportunities, which must be considered in social media marketing

    • It is vital to understand the expectations of your consumers, not for your businesses only, but also for your rivals. Customers always have diverse expectations from different business domains. Here lies the exciting opportunity to exceed the expectations of your present as well as target customers and to outperform the competition.

    • You can also benefit from the fact that most of the companies whether they are small or big are not engaged actively in social media or have not acquired any appropriate approach towards successful social media marketing.

    • Moreover, you can also note the areas of low and high customer satisfaction and address them as well. This will also play an important role in recognising vital opportunities and creating your long term plans and short term strategies.

While a majority of social media hacks is little more than coherent activities, the ones that may astonish you with their efficiency are those that you come up with in-depth learning and observation.

Business owners can become busy and can simply forget to allow time each week for imaginative thinking. Therefore, it is important to perform some strategic evaluation on a standard basis and keep coming up with ideas to dig out enhanced results from your social media marketing efforts.

About Jyoti Wadhwa

Jyoti Wadhwa is an entrepreneur. She is a web programmer and developer by profession. She is an Avid member of Design/Development community. She loves talking on several technical topics related to designing and programming. Follow her on Google Plus and Twitter
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