How social media fuels digital marketing

Back in the days of traditional marketing, you had to worry about advertising impressions and overall return on investment (ROI) of your campaigns, optimizing your work based on your limited resources and the limited choices available. Technology has forced us all to think Digital and go for online marketing, where new metrics were defined, with yet limited resources, but limitless choices that gave away more complicated meaning for optimization.

Digital marketing is more than what it was compared to the early 2000s and further growing, from search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), content marketing, content automation, e-commerce marketing, e-mail marketing to display advertising, etc., so the list goes on. 

Social media marketing plays a pivotal role in ‘digital marketing’ where it has changed the Internet ecosystem. It has created a parallel universe where one’s world is not limited by his/her surrounding but hordes of things happening over the Internet and social media. For the millennials being socially relevant and getting social approval for things they do has become more important. The time spent by an average user on social media is 2.5 hours (50 percent of daily Internet time) making it the prime destination on web. This makes social an inevitable cog of marketing. 

Facebook
Facebook continues to be the reigning champ of social media sites, as the #1 spot where friends connect and share online. More than just a meeting place for friends, Facebook has grown into a venue for businesses to market themselves through interaction with customers and self-promotion. 
Marketers need to understand that Facebook is a soft-sell platform. One needs to understand the unique opportunities and how it differs from other media. A business needs to join conversations and become part of a community, rather than being business ‘outsider’ who tries to sell aggressively. The platform needs to create a human voice for your business, because Facebook users like to talk to other people – not to an impersonal business. Your business Facebook page must be able to write in a voice that sounds real and likeable, using a style that suits your business. 

A Facebook page is a great free marketing tool for businesses. These pages let businesses identify themselves – not just through listing product offerings and services, but also by sharing links, images and posts on a customizable page to give a better sense of a business’ personality and character.
Your Facebook business page is a great spot to develop your brand identity and show your human side. Facebook is where you can loosen the tie a bit – don’t be afraid to be funny. The other is creating competition on your page for greater interaction, where your fans will interact more and to fall in love with your page. Now Facebook has introduced two new Facebook features that are changing the nature of digital marketing. The ‘Instant Article’ tool, which allows publishers to create appealing mobile-first posts directly on the network and live-streaming video trend has takeoff (allows verified users stream videos to their network in real time). These two features are rapidly peaking and they are indeed reshaping the digital marketing efforts. 

Twitter
Twitter has been successful in maintaining its growth in terms of active users, but has failed to translate such growth into revenue increase. As a crowd-based product (like any of the other platforms), the core strength of Twitter lies in its number of active users, however, as a profitable business, revenue generation is always the top priority. Twitter has been changing its usability in different ways, adding many features, whether within the web application or its mobile application which is their competitive advantage. 

The latest and most controversial change that has been applied, was replacing the ‘Favourites’ with ‘Likes’, putting a heart sign instead of the star. Many professionals and users have perceived this step as an attempt to copy Facebook’s experience. Years ago, Twitter was about to implement a feature similar to Facebook’s pages, to help brands promote their products and services on the platform. A few months later, Facebook implemented #hashtags and Twitter seems to have dropped its idea. 

The new ‘Likes’ instead of ‘Favourites’ edit, could be read as a totally different story. The heart is more expressive than the star sign and it helped create a buzz on the platform, with a high number of interactive tweets discussing the new shift. ‘Any publicity is good publicity’, especially when it comes to social media networks. The company has to enhance the experience for advertisers as well and maybe lowering its highly priced model (compared to Facebook and Google) will help the company gain a bigger market share and move toward getting higher revenue.

In all cases, Twitter has allowed many businesses to flourish and is expected to increase its power in different geographical locations. As for the current situation, most of Twitter’s advertisers are companies with reasonably huge marketing budgets – however, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) attempt to have a unique presence on the platform. 

LinkedIn
In the past few years LinkedIn has successfully enhanced its users’ experience on the platform, helping more professionals land on new jobs, hire new employees, build their networks and promote their firms. This has surely reflected on the company’s generated revenue, earning its place as the second highest revenue-generating social media platform, after Facebook. The acquisitions of Lynda.com and Pulse are huge steps in forming the platform’s future usability and the company’s revenue. 

One thing we know for sure is the impact of Pulse’s integration into LinkedIn, allowing for more user-centred articles to be shown to each user, based on their professions, industries and reading preferences. In most of the modern business-to-business (B2B) markets it would be hard not to think of integrating LinkedIn’s Pulse into your marketing strategy. Even for some B2C marketers, the platform has been successfully used for marketing purposes. 

Google
Google has always maintained its place as the market leader of search engines and as the market leader of Algorithm updates. Google professionals have tested the accuracy of the new technology against the accuracy of their own. The system has scored an 80 percent of correct results, when Google Search Engineers have scored 70 percent of correct results, a new era in which you can witness a machine outperforming its own creators. This should indeed be considered within your next SEO strategy, knowing that about 75 percent of search queries on Google consist of three to five words, the engine would usually have enough input to determine the user’s intention.

Measuring effectiveness of social media campaigns
Going social is perhaps the best thing that can happen to your business – you get instant access to millions of visitors so that all you have to do is create and deliver an effective business message. Social media marketing is growing increasingly popular and rightly so. If done correctly, it can do wonders for your business.

But how do you know if your social media strategy is effective? How do you measure its success? Well, here are a few pointers to help you out:

Check engagement of fans
While the number of fans can be a measure of your marketing success, a more accurate measure would be how much your fans are interacting with your page/profile – number of likes, shares, retweets and pokes can be an indication of how effective your campaign is.
The logic is simple. The more your fans engage with your brand, the more interested they’re in your business and the more likely they will be to buy your products.

Check traffic to your website
The primary aim of any social medial marketing campaign is to send traffic to your website. So check your statistics (through Google Analytics) to see how much of your traffic is coming from social platforms and is there any increase since the time you’ve intensified your social campaigns.
At times, it may so happen that you get truckloads of traffic, but your website is not ready to handle it. So get your website ready first. You could opt for cloud hosting as it is flexible enough to handle sudden spikes in traffic.

Check conversions
Getting traffic is great but what if they’re useless to you? The next thing to do is to check if your visitors are taking the desired action. I say desired action because the aim of the marketing campaign may not always be to make a sale. It could also be to make them download an e-book, participate in a contest or even subscribe to a newsletter. Whatever the aim may be, you’ll need to check that it is being achieved.

If your social media marketing campaign is getting you ample traffic but most of the visitors are bouncing off your website, then it can’t be called a successful campaign.

Choosing the right platform
There are many things that contribute to the success of any social media marketing campaign, but the most important one is the choice of the platform. Every social media platform has its own features and attracts a certain kind of audience, so if you want to succeed, you need to know what suits your business the best.

So how do you make sure that you choose right? Here are a few factors you should consider:

Know your audience
The demographics of your audience play an important role in choosing the platform. 
You can do a study of all the criteria and then decide which platform fits the demographics of your target customer the best.

Know your content
When you’re on social media, you promote your business through content. So the type of content you create will determine the platform you choose. For instance:

•  Images: If most of your content comprises of images, then image-sharing platforms like Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr are ideal for you.
•  Videos: If creating awesome videos is your specialty, then you should go for video networks like YouTube, Vimeo and Vine.
•  Posts: If you’re looking at writing engaging posts for your target audience, you should go for Facebook, Twitter or just plain blogging.

Know what you want
Do you want to improve SEO? Do you want more people to walk into your store? Do you want to target smaller niches instead of the social giants mentioned above? Do you want to make connections with other businesses? Knowing what you want will decide what social platform fits best.
For instance, if you want SEO, then it’s Google+; if you want walk-ins then you’ll have to join location-based networks like Yelp and FourSquare; if you want smaller niches, then the perfect place to start is Reddit; and lastly, LinkedIn will help you make those vital business connections.

In conclusion
For best results, it is recommended that you promote your business on at least three to four social platforms. This ensures that you reach out to a wider audience.

Analyse all results to make improvements where needed. Compare your numbers with what you expected. Benchmark against your competitors, products or campaigns so that your stakeholders can easily understand what those numbers mean. It is imperative that you use the analytical marketing tools that are available to gather data today and use that data to shape continually future marketing campaigns toward being highly successful ones.