One of the biggest benefits of using social media marketing is that you have full control of what you present to your audience about your company, brand, and website.

You can tailor your marketing plan to meet specific goals and not leave anything to chance. There are a myriad of tools and apps that allow you to track and test your efforts. Take a look at Klout, SumAll, BuzzSumo, and TweetReach, if you want to enhance and tweak your campaigns as required to constantly improve your efforts to boost conversions.

In summary

So there you are. The 5 top reasons why your business needs social media are:

• Reach
• Relationships
• Showcasing your stellar content
• Traffic
• Control

There is no better time to take advantage of all social media marketing has to offer. If you have an online business and you don’t have a social media presence then you are far behind the curve and at a severe disadvantage from you competitors, it’s really as simple as that. And social media itself is also evolving with the increasing popularity of live video streaming platforms such as Periscope. Blab, Meerkat and Facebook Live. If you don’t keep up you can quickly get left behind!

There are many training courses online to help get you started, and educating yourself on crafting your social media marketing is critical to your overall success.

If you have the cash you could think about hiring a social media marketing expert to set up and manage your campaigns for you; just take care to choose a competent professional as it will not be cheap, but could be worth it if they bring the results your business needs to succeed.

To learn more about live streaming and being on the cutting edge of social media marketing you should take a look here: Video Stream Authority Pro

If you are still trying to build a following using organic traffic and you scream when Google keeps destroying your rankings with one of their ongoing updates, then stop NOW.

Social media can bring you a steady, long term, reliable a stream of traffic to your sites and blogs, without having to worry that some algorithm will come along and wipe you out.

And if you have a little money (and it doesn’t have to be a lot) you can pay for traffic using ads to either drive people to your opt-in pages or to increase Likes to your fan page. Both are good strategies and should be included in you social media marketing arsenal.

In the final post in this mini-series we will look at control…

Social media is a great place to show off your best content, and highlight all your brand has to offer. It doesn’t really matter whether you use text, images, video, or a combination of them all; the beauty of content marketing is that you can tailor your campaign to ensure that it is laser focused on your target audience with the very best content, products, and services that your brand has to offer.

Adding content marketing to your social media strategy allows you to meet many objectives, including building brand recognition and reputation, increasing customer engagement, providing a better customer experience through valuable information and any other goals that your marketing requires so neglect showcasing your content at your peril.

In the next post we will look at traffic…

In the next post we will look at content…

Why does a business that is using social media marketing spend so much time planning, posting, testing, and perfecting their social media strategy? One word; reach! Look at these statistics:

• There are 3 billion active Internet users and over 2.1 billion of them have social media accounts.
• YouTube has over 1 billion users. Did you know that this is more than a 1/3 of all web users?! Just think about the hundreds of millions of hours available on YouTube and how these generate billions of views.
• Facebook has nearly 1.4 billion users, and that is 47% of all Internet users. Do you know how many Likes are generated on a daily basis? 4.5 billion! And did you also know that nearly 75% of Facebook’s revenue comes from mobile advertising. 936 million Facebook users login in at least once per day and over 50% of marketers found a customer on Facebook in 2013.
• Twitter has 316 million monthly active users that generate over 500 million tweets every day!
• Google+ has 363 million users that hit the +1 button over 5 billion times per day.
• Pinterest has 100 million users and the majority of them are women (85%). 47% of Pinterest users purchase a product based on pins, with the average sale being $58.95. Some other Pinterest figures; 67% of pinned content is linked a business site and 82% of Pinterest users would rather follow a brand than a celebrity.

So are you impressed by these statistics?

These stats are just one reason to use social media marketing in your business and they really do highlight the reach that social media can give to your business, whether it is online or brick and mortar. In the next post we will look at relationships…