Social Media Marketing is the process of advertising your site or business through social media channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. Through using a strategy that will connect with your target market and others, you will establish links, attention, and massive amounts of traffic. This benefits organizations and individuals by providing additional channels for customer support, a means to gain customers and competitive insight, and a way of managing their reputation online.
How Does Social Media Marketing Benefit My Business?
Social Media Marketing has many benefits for your business, including attracting primary and secondary traffic and high quality links. “Primary traffic” are the visitors who come from the social media sites. They are the users that come from the posts that you make on your business’s social media profile, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and so on. This usually gives you a large volume of visitors, depending on the importance of your post or blog.
“Secondary traffic” is the referral of traffic from websites which link to you and send you visitors, after they see your content through social sites. Becoming popular on social websites makes it so that other websites want to link to yours. Typically, the traffic generated this way is from sites or blogs within your same niche. They provide a link to your blog because of its popularity on the social media sites, giving value for their own readers or users. Some would argue that secondary traffic is more valuable than primary traffic because the links from other sites bring visitors who are more likely to be interested in your content. This increases recognition for your site through having other users see your content, which in turn builds your brand name.
The links your site gains from the secondary traffic, natural and permanent trusted domains, are quite valuable in helping your site with search engine rankings. Furthermore, optimizing your site to have a proper website structure and content can help to increase search engine ranking, as well. Businesses, especially if releasing a new website, should be using Social Media Marketing to make it easier for links to come in, because the community and buzz has, to a certain extent, given their “certification” to the value of the site. Just remember that really the most important item to worry about is the quality and strength of the article, itself.
Why Use Social Media Marketing?
There are several reasons to use Social Media Marketing for your business. First of all, it’s a natural way to get your site exposed to a large group of people in an impulsive method. Plus, it builds natural links, which is better than advertising your site by paying for paid links.
Secondly, it’s justifiable because once you get the hang of Social Media Marketing, your site is going to be able to gain web traffic on top of the traffic that you already receive from search engines. Social media traffic can very easily be controlled through strategic marketing, unlike increasing your site’s search engine traffic.
Thirdly, you can do your own site’s Social Media Marketing, which costs you nothing aside from your own time and effort. The only real cost you could have is the cost of a freelance designer/programmer, but the benefit most of the time usually surpasses the cost. Some site owners spend thousands of dollars buying links so that their site will rank in the search engines, but the Social Media Marketing, if done correctly, has the capability to provide that for free.
Lastly, Social Media Marketing complements all the other methods that sites use to gain traffic to their site. Social Media Marketing is supposed to send out a message to those in the community and not interfere with all the other methods of gaining traffic. It gives your site’s advertising endeavors, in targeting other websites or search engines, even more potential to succeed, and fits into the campaign perfectly.
Is Using Social Media Marketing Profitable?
Social Media Marketing is not directly profitable, but it is crucial to expanding your business. The way to expand your business and become more profitable is by gaining a core group of supporters who recommend your site to others, or make purchases from your site.
Social Media Marketing is a great way to gain more supporters, which in turn leads to word spreading about your business. It is an excellent way to get people to come to your site and look at what your business has to offer. Your site will grow once you have a group of loyal visitors who take action on what you have to offer.
Since social media websites can provide advantages for links and better search engine rankings, they can increase your site’s income potential. Social Media Marketing makes it easier to get your products out there and generate revenue.