Social media marketing is a form of online marketing through various social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest, and blogging. In it’s most practical form, it’s a method of word of mouth marketing and includes social networking, and various social media sharing channels. The focus point with social media marketing is about building trust and relationships on the social web. It can also be used to increase targeted traffic to your website and blog.
Social media marketing focuses on generating traffic from various sources other than Google. Even though traffic generated from the search engines are good, if you have an optimized social media campaign with call to actions pointing back to your website or blog, it can generated so much more traffic than a good organic ranking could ever do.
If you are curating, creating, and sharing magnetic content with your social media campaign, you are giving your audience a good reason to link and visit your website often. Links (social signals) from social media channels can also help you gain better organic SEO rankings.
Build relationships with your target audience
Social media is very different than brick and mortar store marketing. It’s about creating and publishing valuable content, trust and relationships with your target audience. It’s not about selling directly, but it will follow because it’s a fact that people like to buy from others that the trust.
You can also use the wonders of the social web to build brand awareness and your reputation online so it’s important to brand yourself as the expert in your industry. Your brand is who you are and your trusted connection with others. Be unique and your follower base will follow.
Social media is real time
Social media is real time and your audience can interact and engage with you when you share interesting content with them. With the real time nature of social media, content gets distributed on this medium in seconds. Content sharing is also easy if you integrate social media sharing (bookmarking) functionality on your website and blog.
Once you combine social media with your search engine optimization effort, your source of traffic can become unlimited. If you are interested in using social media with your current marketing activities, make sure to integrate it so that it works as one campaign.
