Social media marketing is the process of promoting your site or business through social media channels (such as Facebook, Digg, and the like) and it is a powerful strategy that will help you to accumulate links, increase brand awareness and considerably improve your daily traffic.
There is no other promotional method out there that will easily give you large numbers of visitors, some of whom may come back to your website again and again, for such a low investment
If you are selling products/services or just want to increase your visibility, social media marketing is a potent method that will make your site profitable over time.
Why is harnessing social media as a marketing channel essential?
- It’s organic. Not only do you get organic links but your website is exposed to large groups of people in a spontaneously as people suggest the content to friends. This differs from paid advertising which has overtly commercial overtones whereas campaigns delivered via social media invariably humanize your business.
- It’s defensible. Once successfully implemented, social communities can be a great source of web traffic acting as an auxiliary to traffic received from search engines. While there are difficulties in trying to increase your search engine traffic, social media traffic can be strategically controlled through effective marketing.
- Excellent ROI. When used to leverage an SEO campaign the benefits will often exceed the cost. It would take you thousands of rands to buy many links (not that buying links is a good thing); social media has the ability to give you that for free. Especially compared to campaigns delivered via traditional mediums.
- Always-On Market Research. Community involvement and interaction on fan pages amounts to a perpetually on qualitative research. Monitoring activity on the network lets you know how your customers react to new offers/services, whether there is a high amount of customer/client satisfaction and other such data which will prove to be invaluable to your company.
