Social media has taken hold in the business world: it's one of the easiest ways to reach new customers. With billions of social media users from different platforms, the potential to get new customers is almost limitless. Beside than being one of the three modern pillars of SEO, social media is also low on cost and has a fairly low barrier to entry.
Whether you're hoping to increase engagement with customers, increase sales, build your brand, funnel traffic to your website, or get others interested in your products and/or services, social media is there to help. But the social media marketing landscape is not as clear as a whistle: there are numerous potential channels available and they don’t all yield the same ROI.
You shouldn’t consider social media marketing trends without evaluating broader trends in digital marketing and content marketing in particular. Content marketing fuels the success in social media marketing and is crucial to many other digital marketing techniques like SEO, SEM and email marketing .
A research from the Content Marketing Institute shows that increasingly companies are creating a defined content marketing strategy and there is specific ownership for content marketing and these plans should also define how social media are used linking to separate resources depending on the size of the organization.
Target Your Efforts for the Best Results
Social media has been a phenomenon, right from the start. With billions of people connected, social media is a potential place for brands and businesses to market their products and/or services. Social media has created its own role where it plays your online social marketing plan.
Every social media marketers may ask themselves: "What is the most effective social media marketing platform for businesses to focus my efforts?" With the rapidly advancing social media analytics and market research, it's possible to understand which social networks are driving the most sales.
If you want a better understanding of how social media influences your customers' decisions to purchase your products and/or services, you must conduct some research about your customers. Most importantly, you need to know where your customers are actually spending their time online.
For example, are they using Facebook frequently to engage with businesses and connect with friends and family, or do they spend most of their time on Twitter or Path? The next step is to go deeper by knowing how your customers are using these platforms.
In this case, a Path user is going to be looking for different things than a Facebook user. Path users are there to interact with limited friends using a sharing moments with pictures more than those users on Facebook that seek for status updates and current events. The platforms where your customers spend most of their time also determines whether you should focus on video, visual, or written updates.
In order to make the most out of your businesses' social media presence, you need to understand which type of contents are going to impact maximum engagement on which network, and listen to everything your industry has to say about you.
Understanding Buying Behaviors
Different people have different habits. And this also applies to your consumers. A research concluded that consumers are more likely to make purchases from certain types via social media than others.
In order to get a better idea of what products your customers are purchasing via recommendations on social media, it’s best to ask them directly. This is because the way people are using these platforms is shifting all the time and there is no way of telling in real time which platform is best for which product.
By asking people directly, you can uncover some valuable information about what your customers are buying, and steer your future marketing efforts to improve your sales conversions via social media.
Since not all platforms are created equal, some social media sites still produce higher conversion rates than others.
Conclusion
When it comes to social commerce, the platform you choose for your business matters. To make the best out of your social media marketing efforts, research suggests that companies need to pay attention to a few key points to maximize their conversions.
Companies that target their content efforts will see the best return. A quick customer survey can help you know which social media site is best for your social marketing strategy.