Why Your Business Needs Social Media Marketing

In today’s day and age, social media marketing is more important than ever. And it should be. With opportunities to reach a wider audience than ever with limited costs, it makes sense for businesses to increase their social presence in every way they can. But it can be hard to know exactly where to commit your time and resources. That’s where we come in. We’ll help you develop a strategy, create content that people share and get your message in front of as many people as possible for as cheaply as possible.

With so many questions to answer about social media marketing, we decided to put together a short video that we hope can help answer most of your questions. Take a look and let us know if we can help you devise a social media strategy for your business.

Investment in Social Media Is More Important Than Ever

Businesses are already coming to terms with the need to integrate their social media efforts with their content strategy, and are seeing the impact of social media in terms of lead generation, referral traffic, and revenue. As businesses see these very real and measurable benefits, many strategists believe we’ll see a move away from assigning social media tasks to existing employees, and see even more companies hiring social media strategists or full-time social media managers.

The benefits of social media are many, but they include:

• Improved social signals (which are a factor in the search ranking algorithm).
• Company branding
• Improved brand awareness
• Word-of-mouth advertising
• Increased customer loyalty and trust
• Improved audience reach and influence

But social media isn’t just a way to reach an immediate audience online, it is also one of the most important ways to boost your rankings in the search engines.

Content Creation: Videos and Photos Are Among The Most Popular Items Shared On Social Media

Statistics show that people are more likely to share items that contain videos and photos rather than text-based content. Visual content will increasingly become a critical piece of any solid content strategy, and social networking sites such as Instagram, Vine and Youtube will continue to become integral parts of many businesses marketing strategies.

Other image-based social media sites like Slideshare, Tumblr, Path, and Mobli will continue to grow, and businesses will need to become more mindful about the ‘sharability’ factor of photos on their websites and blogs in order to derive significant benefit from their social media content marketing efforts.

With the emergence of micro video apps like Twitter’s Vine and now Instagram’s video sharing feature, we’re seeing even more movement toward real-time video sharing. And not just any videos; with Instagram allowing 3-15 seconds per video, and Vine allowing precisely 6 seconds, users are even more likely to create and share videos from their smartphones.

52% of all marketers found a customer via Facebook in 2013.

B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads than those that don’t.

43% of all marketers found a customer via LinkedIn.

In 2013, 55% of marketers worldwide increased digital marketing budgets.

Videos on landing pages increase conversions by 86%.

Inbound marketing delivers 54% more leads than traditional outbound marketing.

Customer testimonials have the highest effectiveness rating for content marketing at 89%.

65% of your audience are visual learners.

Visual data is processed 60,000 times faster by the brain than text.