Social media marketing (SMM) is a form of internet marketing which aims to achieve promotional and marketing communication goals through participation in various social media networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and YouTube.
Supercharge Your Promotions with Social Media Marketing
We often hear of social media in terms of the the sites and platforms mentioned above — Facebook, Twitter, etc. But there’s a very fundamental concept underlying all of them. It’s about establishing a community of support for you and your business. If you’re thinking about these technologies and behaviours at your small business, it’s less about the latest site or community in the social media field than it is about culture change. And that type of change could include updating your business practices.
Why even bother exploring social media as a marketing channel for your website or small business? Of course, you could stick to traditional online marketing, like link exchanges, pay-per-click advertising or the purchase of banner and editorial ads on relevant sites.
Here are some reasons why you might consider using social media:
- Good word of mouth. Internet users today are increasingly skeptical of claims made in banner ads. They prefer to have goods and services recommended to them by their trusted online community. How do they connect with this community? You guessed it: social media.
- Links, naturally. Links to your site are good for business. Not only do you get natural links without any discernible pattern, your website is exposed to large groups of people in a spontaneous way. This is different from paid adverts which have overt commercial overtones.
- It’s defensible. Once mastered, social communities can be a wonderful source of traffic on top of any web traffic already coming your way from search engines. While you can’t easily boost your search engine traffic, social media traffic to your site designed by St Albans Web Design can be quite easily controlled through strategic marketing.
- It’s low cost and high returns. Once you’ve established yourself as an authority in your field, the only real investment is your time. The benefits will often exceed any small costs. While it would cost hundreds or thousands of pounds to buy links via banner ads online, social media has the ability to give you those links for free.
- It complements other efforts. Social media optimization and marketing is usually community-specific. It doesn’t interfere with any other methods of getting traffic to your website. It can fit perfectly with an ad campaign targeting other websites or search engines.
So How Does Social Media Help Me Increase Profits?
Well, it doesn’t — at least not directly. Every site that wants to expand and become profitable needs a core group of supporters (your community) who will be willing to either make purchases or at least recommend the product or service to others. Your site needs to perpetuate itself.
Contact St Albans Web Design in Hertfordshire to see how we can help your business begin taking advantage of Social Media today.