Why is Social Media Marketing Important for Your Business?

With chances to establish relationships, engage with customers, and grow sales like never before, social media marketing has become a vital tool in the arsenal of brands and enterprises of all types over the last decade, and the statistics back it up. According to a PewInternet poll conducted in January 2014, 74% of adults in North America use social networking sites, with 82 percent of 30-49-year-olds and 89 percent of 18-29-year-olds using them. In addition, research from social media analysts Digitas predicts that the growth of social commerce could make it a business worth $30 billion before the end of 2017.
And in a Social Media In a 2015 Examiner study, 91 percent of respondents indicated that working on social media marketing for at least 6 hours per week boosted their company's exposure. If you're not using social media at all, or your current strategy isn't working for you as well as you hoped, now is the time to make a change.
You are about to learn expert hints and tips to effectively market your business across all of the most popular social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, and Pinterest.
Each chapter is grouped broadly into several sections including profile optimization, content strategy, and advice on paid advertising.
Success in social media marketing results from building strong and long-lasting relationships with customers and professional contacts, and sharing the type of content and expertise that they will want to share onwards to their friends, family, and colleagues.
This approach will help to attract and keep loyal customers and connections, and encourage brand ambassadors to sell your business for you – a complete reverse of the traditional marketing model!
While this approach is a world away from the way traditional marketing works, this open, two-way communication is now what billions of consumers around the world expect from the businesses and brands to whom they invest time and money.
Direct selling does have a place, but as you’ll learn, it isn’t the “front and center” where social media marketing is concerned.
Before You Begin: Key Considerations For All Social Media Marketing
Peer pressure, success stories in the media, and general hype tell today’s business owners that having a presence on social media is essential.
That’s not to say a business couldn’t do well without utilizing social networking, but they certainly are missing out on a myriad of opportunities to build and grow.
However, one of the biggest mistakes that a brand can make is to leap into social media marketing with no real clue of what they are going to do with it; only the vague hope it will somehow make their fortune.
While there is a possibility that you get really lucky, in most cases this kind of unplanned approach will lead to unrealistic goal-setting, poor results, a huge waste of time, and ultimately a defeatist attitude that puts you off the idea of social media marketing completely.
To ensure that this doesn’t happen to you and to give you the best chance of success I urge you to digest the key considerations for social media marketing detailed below.
By the end of this explanation, you will have a firm understanding of what kind of approach works for business on social media, and how to take your efforts in a well-planned, logical direction.

Decide which social networks will work best for you
Unless you're a big company with the resources to plow full speed ahead into every potentially viable social platform, chances are you're better to focus on one or two “core” social networks first.
It's better to excel on a couple of social networks than be mediocre on five or six, and while social media is (mostly) free, your time is valuable.
Indeed, depending on the type of business you run, not every social media site is going to suit your marketing, your audience, or what you are trying to achieve. To help you decide where to begin, identify which social networks your target audience already "hangs out" or use customer personas and research social network demographics to judge where you will best be received. Joining Facebook and Twitter is often a given for brands simply due to their sheer size and influence, but more "niche" communities with their unique attributes - still with hundreds of millions of users, mind you Pinterest, Instagram, or LinkedIn may be places where you can make a stronger impression. You'll learn all about what each particular social network brings to the table as they are introduced in the chapters to come, but to start, experiment with a couple of social networks where you can invest some significant time, track your progress, and then either build on your achievements with them or steadily begin to experiment with other platforms on which you might have additional (or better) success.

Define and assess your goals
Before you start posting content to social media, it is useful to define the guiding themes and overall goals of your strategy, as these will help you shape the way you approach what may well become the linchpin in your marketing machine.
I'm a fan of the SMART technique for creating actionable social media goals.
Here's a breakdown, hopefully, they'll help you too:

Specific: Be specific in what you want to achieve.
Do you want to raise awareness of your brand?
Increase sales?
Improve customer service?
Strengthen loyalty?

Measurable: How will you know that your goal has been achieved?
What analytics tools will you use to track your progress?

Achievable: Is your goal realistic?
When you are just starting, don’t aim too high at the risk of being deflated if you don’t hit your projected goal; getting adept at all this stuff (particularly if you are approaching social media marketing seriously for the first time) takes a while.
Relevant: Is your goal aligned with your company's mission, vision, and values?

Time Specific: When do you want to have achieved the goal?
Stick to one overall aim at a time to bring emphasis to your marketing, such as "I want to boost traffic to our website by 15% in the next three months."
For example, if you’re a shoe store owner and you normally sell 20 pairs of shoes a day, why not aim to use social media to help you sell 25 per day?
After a good amount of time (at least a few months), evaluate where you are by using analytics tools, social insights (likes, followers, comments), and other metrics to help you track and measure your activity - you'll find lots more information on these shortly.

Perform an audit to help shape your content strategy
An audit is one of the finest methods to gain a sense of the type of social media content strategy that will resonate with your audience, as well as a wonderful approach to deciding what you want to post to your audience.
Take time to identify your audience's needs, desires, and interests on social media - ask yourself what problems you can help them overcome, what questions you can answer, and what type of content they prefer (e.g. text, photo, graphics, video), and when they are most likely to be around to see it.
Tools like SEM Rush and TrueSocial Metrics are two popular paid options if you want to dig right down into the details, but you needn't spend a penny to get a good, general idea... especially if you use your competition to help you out! First, identify your competitors (you presumably already know who they are, but a quick Google search will reveal them), then browse their websites and social media profiles. Make notes on how often your rivals publish blogs and status updates on social media, and which content seems to perform best for them based on the number of likes, comments, and shares. You can gain further insight by identifying how much of this content appears to be original versus shared from other sources, and what the topics and tone of voice used are like. Use the information you gather to mirror successful types of content in your own social media strategy, but also to identify gaps and opportunities where you can do better.