The Strength of Social Media

Many Marketing Directors and business owners think of social media marketing as something less important compared to other internet marketing services. Not true. Social media is just as important as other forms of Internet Marketing. Social media is helping businesses to forge a new era in business transparency and engagement, creating both new challenges and opportunities. Social Media can not only help you strengthen the relationship with your customers but it can also help strengthen your internet marketing campaigns through complete integration. I believe that the foundation of social media marketing can be established by using the 4 C’s: create, collaborate, and communicate, and convert.

Create is referring to the intricate process of developing optimized content that is made to reach the customer and will also help with your SEO. Providing compelling content which caters to the interests of your visitors and you will keep them on your site once they have arrived; organize your content so that it guides your visitors through the conversion process in a simple manner, as well as motivating them to return in the future.

Collaborate refers to your social media efforts joining forces with all marketing mediums online and off. We have made it to the point where nearly all social media can connect with each other making it easier to communicate with your customers across all platforms. Those very same social media sites, using your optimized content, help influence your position within the organic search results. They can be placed, as buttons; in your email blasts so that after you communicate with them, they can communicate with you. This gives your customer the ability to quickly and easily give you feedback while they are there to see what’s new. You can also use your favorite social media site, i.e. Facebook, as a landing page for your PPC (Pay-Per-Click) or use a social media widget, i.e. “Like” box, so your customer can see who else thought your ad was helpful. Lastly, would be web analytics which you can use to not only track all of your other internet marketing mediums but also almost all of your SM. You can track your SM buttons, landing pages, widgets, PPC ads, conversions, and who, what, when, where, and how people communicate.

Communicate refers the public and private interaction that you have with your current and future customers on your social media sites. These interactions provide an open and transparent channel for people to interact with you and each other, without the pressure of response that comes with e-mail. Public interactions are a great starting point for engagement that never existed before social media, giving businesses the opportunity to build relationship and funnel customer to convert.

Convert refers to the “call to action” in online media to generate intentional outcomes. According to The Social Media Marketing Survey by R2integrated, over a third of companies surveyed (36.1%) say that they are converting traffic from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Youtube into sales. This is what I think would be a company’s main goal and it is measurable which helps with most companies sole problem with social media….ROI.