Just to be sure, if you are in any way, shape or form unclear as to the value of social media marketing, here are just three reasons why it needs to be part of your comprehensive online marketing plan. Maybe your current plan puts more emphasis on search engine marketing, maybe you are currently focused on outreach—those are all well and good.
But to round things out and add a lot more value to your current online marketing campaign, social media marketing must be part of the equation. It does not have to take center stage, it does not have to be your overarching priority, but it must be part of the total mix. Here are just three of the thousands of reasons why your company, regardless of its size, needs to do social media marketing.
Reason 1: Social media’s huge direct and viral reach
If you build a solid page on Facebook, you develop a direct reach. This means that a certain percentage of people who like your page will see your updates. While it is true that Facebook has been reducing the organic reach of Facebook pages recently, there is a workaround to that. When people go to your page, you can instruct them to like your page and then click your page’s setting to show your updates first.
You might want to show a video that teaches people how to do this. You might even post an animated gif. Whatever you do, clue people in that they can fix their settings to see your updates first. Now, for people to take the time and bother to do this, you have to offer content that is valuable. This puts the onus on you. There must be real value on your page for them to want to do this. But you can increase your direct reach by instructing people.
On top of that, when people like your content, they can share it on their wall. Since people on Facebook have friends and their friends have friends, this can easily have an exponential effect. In fact, even if your page only has a hundred likes, but these are real people with real friends, do not be surprised if one of your posts gets viral and spreads all over the place.
Social media enables you to have a large direct reach. It also provides you with a tremendous opportunity to enjoy an exponential content coverage.
Reason 2: Social media is habitual
While different demographics have shown softening or weakening of social media usage on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, this still does not take away from the fact that a lot of people habitually use social media. In fact, a lot of people do this the first thing in the morning.
When they wake up, they go their mobile phone or tablet and check their updates. It can easily become a habit. This gives you a tremendous opportunity to get your content and brand in front of many interested eyeballs.
Reason 3: Target audiences use different content formats
The great thing about social media marketing is that you are not restricted to just one content format. You are not restricted to video, pictures, links, blog posts, text, or audio files. Instead, different platforms specialize in different formats. And when you create content for one platform, you can easily make different versions of it in different formats to spread out to other platforms.
For example, I write a blog post and post it on Facebook. I create a very attention-grabbing graphic for that blog post. So, when I post it on my Facebook page, a preview of the image shows up and it grabs a lot of attention. People click on it, and they end up on my website.
I can take that graphic and share it on Pinterest. I can take the text of my blog post or article and create a slideshow video out of it and share it on YouTube. I can also take the video and embed it on my blog post. I can strip different parts of the article or post itself and feed it into Twitter along with the link to the full post or article.
Do you see how this works? You get access to the different audiences of those different platforms by simply re-purposing or recycling the same content that you made for one platform and sharing those other formats on other platforms. This increases your potential reach.