Alysse Normoyle — October 3, 2019 
Why have so many businesses, brands and individuals embraced Facebook or Instagram pages? They understand the importance of social media and how it adds value. Now that consumers often experience interactions with companies that are not face-to-face, shifting to social media has become an ideal way to actively engage with customers.
When it comes to enhancing your brand’s overall visibility, there is no subset of marketing that is shifting faster than social media. Every business or professional can benefit from understanding social media’s importance when it comes to reaching their audience and strengthening their brand.
Understand Social Media Importance With 5 Benefits to the Strategy
- It Shows The World Who You Are
With social media, you have the opportunity to highlight all the best aspects of your business with one click.
What information would be most useful for your potential and current clients to have easy access to?
Don’t leave this vital question unanswered! Social media’s importance is seen when you realize your social pages become a hub for users to easily find out more about your business and what you care about, without clicking away from the app or website they’re already browsing.
How trustworthy is a business that shows very limited facets of its work? Social platforms provide an opportunity to legitimatize your brand. Social media allows you to demonstrate your expertise in a variety of ways along with the ability to write staff bios, share posts and produce content that can creatively highlight your company’s core values, brand voice and unique qualities that your services provide.
You can use social media as a platform to distinguish your brand from competitors, too. Showing consumers that your brand personality is clearly defined and consistent is valuable, but you also want to make sure you are also wrapping your brand identity in with common trends on the internet (as appropriate) to show your audience that you are up-to-date on the world around you.
Having a strong familiarity with all aspects of your brand allows you to have a better idea of your social media platforms’ influence when interacting with clients.
Remember, you don’t want to sound inauthentic! Understanding the importance of social media and investing in it gives you the ability to show that you can connect on a personal level with your audience.
2. Target and Attract Your Audience
When it comes to the importance of social media, there are so many different purposes – it’s up to you to define how you want to use it!
Is your business trying to gain a general following or is there a specific audience that would value from learning about your services? It’s critical to figure out exactly who are you trying to reach with your messages. With the advancements of social media, getting to reach and interact with your audience has never been easier!
In order to create a message that resonates with your audience and clients, know exactly who you’re targeting. You don’t want your intentions to be lost because they were misdirected.
Social media is important because it allows you to reach people locally, regionally, nationally and even internationally. If you understand the characteristics of your target audience, you will be able to personalize your messages to resonate with that audience more appropriately. For example, how you communicate with a teenager online isn’t the same voice you would use with a baby boomer. You are in control of reaching your marketing targets with more ease than ever!
The importance of social media is seen in that it provides value while also creating a low-cost way to market your business. Plus, social media allows you to have direct control over the messages you share with the world.
Although increasing and maintaining your presence effectively on social media is important, it is essential to be realistic about the amount of energy and time you might need to invest in reaching larger audiences.
The importance of social media is clear. Ask yourself these questions as you determine your target audience.
Ask these questions when evaluating your audience:
- Who is the target audience you are trying to reach with social media?
- What platforms can your audience be accessibly reached?
- Generally, is the target audience tech-savvy?
- What trends are popular among this audience?
Knowing your audience and who you want to reach will generally give you more confidence in your online interactions.
3. Embrace Diversity In Your Content
Work towards diversifying your interactions by evaluating the best social media platform to share your messages on! Major platforms can reach thousands or millions of people; your next client might be one of them.
While social media increases your ability to connect, social media’s importance is also seen by allowing you a variety of options when evaluating which channel is best for you.
Having diversity in your social media content (through varying topics, content structure, etc.) is a valuable way to connect with your target audience and maximize your return on investment. Although maintaining a presence on a variety of platforms is important for your image and branding, you don’t want to be confused and direct energy into an outlet that isn’t effective.
Here are popular platforms, and their purposes, that you can reach potential clients on:
- Facebook allows users to post, like and share content (pictures, videos, articles, etc) with just the click of a button. Much of the content is made public so it can reach as large of an audience as possible.
- Twitter has a character limit to its messages, so messages are more concise and, at times, more informal. Users can favorite and retweet content to their followers that are made public.
- Instagram is a hub for sharing photos or short videos. Users can post content on their general newsfeed or give live video updates as part of the Story feature.
- LinkedIn creates a space for users to widen their professional networks. They can share articles in their field, look for job updates or watch informative training videos to increase their industry knowledge.
- Pinterest lets users discover new content (pictures, articles, links) based on their favorite interests. They can browse by topic and categorize their findings into aesthetically pleasing boards.
Don’t limit yourself to one outlet for reaching your audience on social media. The way you engage with your audience on one network does not necessarily guarantee it will resonate with your audience on another. If you don’t have custom content for different situations, it will lack individuality and be difficult to connect to.
As you start to determine what social media platforms are best for you, you may discover that you aren’t able to personally allocate as much time as you wanted to put into your social media campaign. Hiring an outside marketing firm can help reach your goals that are seeming daunting. Read this blog post to find out what questions you should keep in mind as you find a social media firm to work with.
4. Create An Attainable Plan
Translate your marketing goals into the online sphere!
After you have critically assessed your needs as well as what you are looking to do, create a specific plan that to put that into effect.
Determine a timeline for your social media campaign and start to create some SMART goals:
- Specific. Determine what your purpose for using social media is.
- Measurable. How are you planning to track the progress of your initial goals?
- Attainable. Choose social media goals that can be easily accomplished. Create a simple plan on platforms that are easy to navigate!
- Relevant. How does your social media enhance your brand image and business?
- Timely. Properly plan time to produce content to see progress on your platforms.
Recognize your social media’s importance by taking the time to establish SMART goals for your strategy.
Every great plan has some flexibility to it! Building a brand identity on social media can take time and you want to be well informed on all your options.
Take care when choosing your goals and also be realistic that they may change after launch as you begin interacting with your followers and seeing which posts resonate best with them.
5. Easily Track Campaign Results
You put in all this effort into planning and building your social media accounts, but how do you measure social media importance? Follow your content and deliverables with ease.
The importance of social media comes down to creating a space for you to review and analyze the results of your work with impeccable detail and data! Easily evaluate tracked metrics to your original goals.
Checking up on your social media’s data and statistics is a great way to re-evaluate if you are meeting your original intentions. Do not forget that even though social media can be saturated with information, some of your content will still require daily follow-up while others might not require as much attention.
You will be able to easily see trends in your data and start to see where you may need to tweak aspects of your campaign.
After checking-up on data, are you starting to notice certain aspects of your social media campaign that are working well? Are your other deliverables not showing the same results?
By learning more about what interests your audience, you will be able to also decide which types of social media content they find engaging. Remember that results can take as long as 12-18 months, so don’t be discouraged if you do not see immediate results.
Once a certain amount of time passes, check back on your original goals with your social media accounts. Did you achieve them?
Understanding the unknown can be daunting. With major innovations in the marketing field, consider these 5 essential steps when you start putting your brand out there.
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