Social media offers new communication channels for business to interact with their customers, clients and prospects. Users on major social media sites, however, behavior differently.
If you’re like most of us, you probably started following a few of your friends when you first started using Facebook, but you probably don’t follow a lot of businesses. You’re there to relax and have fun. It’s kind of a different story over on Twitter. Many people do follow business accounts and engage in plenty of interaction in hope to get discount deals. On LinkedIn, people, professional or not, will dress and talk in suits. The social media strategy for a website that sells wedding dresses would be different from the one used by a website that matches the sellers and buyers of dental practices.
The ways that consumers and business partners interact on social media have created a real challenge for online marketers and business owners. To get the most out of the social media, we need to really understand the culture on social media in general and user behaviors on different social media platforms in particular.
Social Media Brings Quality Traffic
For online marketing, creating a website is easy part. The challenge is to drive targeted visitors to your sites. For most small business websites, the majority of traffic comes from search engines or social media sites like Facebbok, Twitter, Pinterest, or Linkedin. Good social media presence not only brings quality traffic to your websites, but also enhances interaction with your customers.
Social media is an extension, and enhancement of your existing web marketing strategies. For instance, effective social media marketing strategy by a professional practice of any kind has the potential to drive a significant amount of traffic to your existing website. All those links that get posted will, if the content’s really interesting, generate a lot of clicks.
Social Content Could Go Viral
The key to a successful social media campaign is to create relevant and interesting social content. A piece of social content could generate millions of hits if it goes viral. “Will It Blend” is a classic case of social content going viral. In general, images or videos work better than articles. For those who promote professional services on social media, interactive content works better than text alone.
Social Signals Boost Search Engine Rankings
Social media sites may drive lot of traffic to your websites if implemented properly. The social traffic, however, doesn’t convert as well as search traffic because searchers are more likely to make a buying decision.
With the latest Google Panda/Penguin updates, social signals iare one of most important factors for ranking web pages besides quality links. A site/page will rank better if it has naturally gained solid social counts. Social counts, just like links, are considered votes for a website or page. It’s more reliable to use social counts to calculate votes than links. After all, links can be easily manipulated that social counts. Websites struggling to compete in their respective search terms will have good boost to their ranks in major search engines with good social content.
Social media is an effective, and affordable, marketing tool that will work for any business willing to put in the work.