Why all Digital Marketing Experts need Social Media to be a part of their comprehensive online marketing plan.
Just to be sure, if you are in any way, shape or form unclear as to the value of social media marketing, here are just 4 reasons why it needs to be part of your comprehensive online marketing plan. Maybe your current plan puts more emphasis on search engine marketing, maybe you’re currently focused on outreach—those are all well and good.
But to really round things out and add a lot more value to your current online marketing campaign, social media marketing has to be part of the equation.
Reason #1: Social media’s huge direct and viral reach
If you build a solid page on Facebook, you develop a direct reach. This means that a certain percentage of people who like your page will see your updates. While it is true that Facebook has been reducing the organic reach of Facebook pages recently, there’s a workaround to that. When people go to your page, you can instruct them to like your page and then click your page’s setting to show your updates first.
Reason #2: Social media is habitual
While different demographics have shown softening or weakening of social media usage on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, this still doesn’t take away from the fact that a lot of people habitually use social media. In fact, a lot of people do this the first thing in the morning.
Reason #3: Target audiences use different content formats
The great thing about social media marketing is that you’re not restricted to just one content format. You’re not restricted to video, pictures, links, blog posts, text, or audio files. Instead, different platforms specialize in different formats. And when you create content for one platform, you can easily make different versions of it in different formats to spread out to other platforms.
For example, I write a blog post and post it on Facebook. I create a very attention-grabbing graphic for that blog post. So when I post it on my Facebook page, a preview of the image shows up and it grabs a lot of attention. People click on it, and they end up on my website.
I can take that same graphic and share it on Pinterest. I can take the text of my blog post or article and create a slideshow video out of it and share it on YouTube. I can also take the video and embed it on my blog post. I can strip different parts of the article or post itself and feed it into Twitter along with the link to the full post or article.
Do you see how this works? You get access to the different audiences of those different platforms by simply re-purposing or recycling the same content that you made for one platform and sharing those other formats on other platforms. This increases your potential reach.
Reason #4: Most social media platforms can be segmented
If you’ve ever been to Instagram, you know that when you see a picture, it usually has many different tags. If you’ve been on Twitter, you’d see that a lot of the hot tweets also have hashtags. Those tags are very valuable. When you use a tag with your content, you are essentially categorizing your content. People use those tags to search for content. This is a very powerful segmentation tool.
Your better approach would be to make that content work for you by converting it into many different formats.
I hope this helped 🙂