Do you know, there are now more than 4.2 billion active social media users in the world and growing rapidly each year. 316 million new social media users have come online within the last 12 months. Hence, if you’re not taking advantage of social media for your digital marketing strategy, you’re missing out on a fast, reliable, inexpensive, and effective way to reach almost half the world’s population.
Social media encloses many small pieces that are attached together to reach people, raise your voice, attract customers and business. But the question is, is it worth investing in your social media? should social media marketing be a focus area for your marketing strategy?
And the answer is a big “YES”
However, it is important for every business owner to know the Ins and outs of each digital marketing tactic and how they can help their business to grow.
What is Social Media Management and Optimization?
Social media management is the process of creating, publishing, promoting and managing content across social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and engaging with your audience to increase your visibility and business reach. You can organise social media management with free and paid tools as well as from professional social media management service providers like us.
Social Media Optimization is an advanced but necessary step to give your social media accounts a professional touch and make them business-ready with perfect branding and re-designing. Social Media Optimization includes several steps like modifying your profile bio to cover page, writing a perfect description to design professional highlight cover pages.
You may be familiar with social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and Twitter but are you familiar with how these channels can help you grow your business grow? If not then Let’s Discuss the Importance of Social Media Management for a business.
Importance of Social Media Management and Optimization in Business
Social media has become an essential part of online marketing strategy among small businesses because of its cost-effectiveness, ability to reach targeted audiences quickly and generate more leads and sales. First of all, It costs nothing to join most social media platforms. Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter etc all are free of cost. Secondly, it’s a fast, inexpensive and highly effective way to grow your business.
But it is also highly important that your Social Media accounts must be handled by experts, who can do social media optimization for you, understands your branding needs, does research about your audience and follows the latest market trends, expertise in graphic design and content writing etc. Let’s understand 5 reasons why Social Media Management is so important for a business.
1. Boosts Brand Awareness & Create Positive Impression
A survey reveals that 68% of customers who get interesting and creative content on your social media handles are likely to remember and recommend you or your company to others, which means that when people see creative and attractive content on your social media handle the more awareness and trust is built for your brand.
When people see interesting posts and videos on your social media accounts on regular basis, it creates a very positive impression about your brand and business. They are most likely to follow your brand page, like your posts, comment on it and share it with others. This leads to boost your brand awareness in a very high and effective way. That’s why it is always recommended to get your social media handle managed by an expert who understands your audience and according to that creates robust content.
2. Generates More Leads
When you hear the word “Lead Generation”, Social media might not be the first thing that will strike your mind, but it should be. Social media impacts nurturing the leads and offering fancy branding, resulting in greater ROI for businesses, enabling them to reach a larger audience at a minimal cost. A study reveals that 63% of customers actually expect companies to offer customer service through their social media, another study also says, 55% of consumers learn about new brands on social media. That means Social Media is one of the best platforms to get customers.
One can simply generate leads by creating attractive posts for your audience, monitoring Social Media accounts, listing feedbacks, looking at direct mentions, hashtag research, Targeted ads, checking competitors’ followers etc.
3. Connect with Customers Directly
One of the main goals of almost all businesses is developing a loyal customer base. Having an online presence on any of the social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram enables a great way to interact with your audience, to connect with them on a personal level and developing a loyal customer base.
A study suggests, 78% of consumers are willing to buy from a company after having a positive experience with them on social media. Hence it is very important to connect and engage with your audience on social media by replying to their questions and queries via comments/messages and resolving their queries raised on social media. Because studies show that 62% of customers are more loyal to brands that directly engage with them on social media.
4. Grow Audience on a Small Budget
Social media is the best inexpensive way for the marketing of your business. You can grow your audience by using so many free and paid tools available on multiple social media platforms. For example, you can create long explainer videos regarding your product or business using IGTV or YouTube, you can create short videos to focus on a particular product using Instagram Reels or YouTube shorts or You can use Facebook and Instagram ad services to promote anything to a targeted audience on a budget less than 100Rs.
You grow on social media when you are consistent in uploading your content on a regular basis and making it interesting and different from your competitors. The best method is to use SEO content that is using the most trending words, hashtags and keywords. This will help social media algorithms to bring your content to the top of the search result and eventually more visibility.
Once your social media management is done effectively it will gradually increase the traffic on your social media pages, leading to more followers and customers for you.
5. Increase in Website Traffic
What is the main goal of businesses that depend on their website for brand awareness, sales and acquiring customers? Obviously to get more traffic to their website. Last year, over 13% of publishers’ referral traffic came only from Facebook, which is an improvement from 2019’s 11%. Social media is also said to be the primary source for generating eCommerce traffic.
If you are confident and serious about your content on Social Media, then you also need to be serious about those posts and use them to attract referral traffic to your website. One great way to do this is to share your post with the website link to it on social media regularly. Another great way is, immediately after publishing a new blog post on our website, we can share and also promote that post on social media. When we share it with each of our networks, we create referrals for our website/blog post through social media posts.
There is no restriction on the number of times you can share the same content on social media, sharing your content multiple times on social media can trigger strong reactions, but we also need to ensure we are not oversharing and spamming.
5 Social Media Management Tips that can save your time, efforts and money
1. Have a strategic plan and goal
Always remember every good business strategy starts with a good plan. You can use social media for free but the time and effort involved in it is a big investment. Without a plan, you have no clear goal for what you are trying to achieve. You need to create your Social Media Strategy that follows a smart framework that should be specific measurable relevant and attainable.
2. Follow a Social Media Calendar
A Social Media Calendar allows you to plan out your future content the date and time on which they are required to be posted and everything which is important for your social media post can be scheduled in your Social Media Calendar. A Social Media Calendar can help you to effectively use your time.
3. Focus on Top-Performing Platforms of Social Media
To improve your ROI, you should focus on those platforms that provide you best results for doing this first start comparing various social media platforms according to their performance, cost and usage by the audience and then select the best according to your business.
4. Research and Use hashtag# to increase your reach
You can reach your target audience more easily by using a hashtag, and others can locate your information more easily. Hashtags make it easier for social media users to discover information. When you use a unique hashtag, your message stands out to those who find it useful. Using hashtags is completely free then why you should not use it considering that tweet that into 3-4 hashtags are 58% more likely to get retweeted and Instagram post which has hashtags can help you to reach a larger audience. Hashtags also work as a referral which redirects the users back to your post.
But it’s also important to keep in mind that too many hashtags will not result in more engagement but will devalue the strength of your message. It also creates a negative impression among your audience that you are desperate for attention.
Pro tip – don’t use more than 6 to 7 hashtags in a post
5. Outsourcing
Outsourcing social media management will help you to reduce your time and efforts. When your social media is outsourced and handled by experts, you don’t have to worry about the content you need to create for social media on a particular event or covering important news/sales or deciding the colour combination you need to follow or when you need to post the content. Everything will be handled by a dedicated team.
How ImproBrand can help
ImproBrand always believes in a total value approach. To fathom out the pressing problems of your business’s Social Media & move towards obtaining integrated business value, ImproBrand has developed the Total Value Approach to address these needs and measures the value created by the experts of multiple areas like Creative Content, Business Research, Graphics & Illustrations, SEO etc through our one of the flagship services “Social Media Management & Optimization (SMM&O)”. The value that this service shares with your business is by integrating your business mission with the broader impact of your social media at large. With the aim of ‘Digital India’ and to cater for the growth of all kinds of business, ImproBrand offers the “Social Media Management & Optimization (SMM&O)” service at a very competitive price that can be affordable at ease.
Conclusion
It’s clear that social media is a great advantage for your business. The importance of social media management says if your social media is not managed properly or not updated regularly you are missing a great way for marketing as well as leaving a bad impression among your audiences. Imagine a person who wanted to check your social media accounts before making a purchase decision, but when they found your social media is not managed properly, what impression it will create. The sooner you start the faster you will get results.