Social Media as a Marketing Tool

How better to advertise your business than to showcase your product or service to a captive audience? Through the use of social media, you can target potential customers, communicate with current clients and develop relationships with other members in your industry. Advertising on social media, if done correctly, can be an invaluable tool.

Facebook, for example, has approximately two billion active users worldwide. You can start your advertising by asking your friends to like your business page. Eventually, friends of those friends will ask about your business and seek recommendations. You can also attract traffic to your business page by hosting contests or giveaways. Not only will you create more of an online presence, but you will also appeal to people who are interested in what you have to offer; these people are your target audience. 

To take your interactions on the social media platform to a new level, you can also create Facebook chatbot

Chatbot is a feature you can integrate with messenger to interact with your customers. Instead of forcing customers to call with questions or wait for a direct response from you, a chatbot can offer customer service in a chat forum. 

Starting Point

It’s easy to get sidetracked with minute details when venturing into social media marketing. To be sure you don’t overlook the forest for the trees and get lost in the many facets of social media, make sure you have a plan of attack. 

  • Figure out what you are hoping to gain from your marketing: If you can identify what you want, you stand a better chance of achieving it. 
  • Decide which platform to use to target your audience: Every social media platform has a specific audience. Understand which users utilize which platform and choose the one that best aligns with your business. For example, Instagram is visually focused; keeping that in mind, marketing for a travel company would be better received by users of Instagram than it would on LinkedIn.
  • Brand awareness: What message are you trying to deliver as a company? In order to successfully sell your brand, consumers have to understand what is important to you as a business. So, you have to reinforce your social and ethical obligations to show them where you stand. 

By getting your company and its message out on social media, not only are you gaining brand awareness but you are building relationships with customers, increasing web traffic and improving communication with your target audience. 

Equally as important as creating an online presence and engaging with your consumers is maintaining that level of interaction. Customers are interacting with your company and the brand you created because of all your hard work making your message and purpose known. If your interactions begin to fizzle, so will your customer base. Consistency is key. 

Interactions

Using social media to your marketing advantage can be priceless. The beauty of having an online presence is the depth and other aspects of your business can be illustrated more clearly when you have the opportunity to interact with your customers. Social media encourages people to interact with businesses and vice versa. It makes your professional relationship more personable and humanizes you. 

Staying on top of online engagement once you have an established audience will increase your website traffic. It’s easy to become complacent once you reach your goal level of engagement, make sure you don’t lose that consumer attention by skimping on your content. Keep your posts informative, interactive and fun. Above all, embrace the excitement of making who you are stand out.