Sunday, 08 January 2012 12:00
One of the growing areas of internet marketing is social media marketing. Social medica marketing serves many purposes, and if used correctly, it can ramp up your internet presence, increase your website traffic and increase sales.
Increasing Internet Presence
With the advent of social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, many companies of all sizes have discovered it is a valuable tool to reaching out to potential and current customers. In a recent study from the Pew Foundation, it was found that the majority of young adults check their social media accounts more than four times a day. This means that they are interacting with their followers and reading posts from companies and people they have an interest in.
Developing a following can be a simple as posting several times a day about related topics of interest to your targeted customers. You can target customers based on their interest and their geographic location. The advantage of posting to social media outlets is that your post not only gets sent to current followers, but it also gets posted on the primary page of the outlet. As a result, almost instant viral marketing can occur if your post is of extreme interest and with a few minutes of effort and a couple of keystrokes, your message can be sent out to literally hundreds of thousands of established and potential new customers.
Improving Search Engine Ranking
Another benefit of using social media marketing is that it is a terrific way to improve your search engine ranking. Search engine ranking is important because the average consumer goes to the internet to research products and services before they make a purchasing decision. Additionally, ,the average consumer only clicks on sites that appear in the first page of search engine results. As result, it is extremely important to have a strong ranking in order to drive customers to your website and make sales.
One of the ways that search engines determine rankings is based on the number of quality organic backlinks to your website. With social media marketing, every time you make a post, you create thousands of backlinks. Backlinks are created as the message is sent to your followers, and additional backlinks are posted if they forward your message to their own network of followers.
Increasing Sales
Social media marketing is a wonderful way to reach potential customers and generate interest in your company and website. For example, if you have an e-commerce store that sells women’s shoes, you can send out a post on Twitter that contains a special discount code. Your followers will see the code and go to the website to look at your products, since many people will respond to the opportunity to get a bargain. Additionally, if your products are of interest, your followers will forward your post to their own network of followers. As a result, not only are you creating backlinks to improve your search engine rankings, but you are also creating additional website traffic and increasing your opportunities to make sales.
Social media marketing is here to stay. If you are looking for ways to improve your bottom line without a large expenditure of effort and money, consider diving into the social media marketing arena.