Role of Social Media in Modern Marketing
What is social media marketing and why it matters
Social media is a catch-all term for any digital, interactive community. For instance, Twitter is a platform designed to let people share short messages and media links with others. Facebook, meanwhile, is a full-blown social networking site where users share updates, images, and videos, join events and groups, and do a variety of other activities.
Social media marketing is the use of popular social media platforms to connect with your target audience and market your brand’s products and services.
Five critical reasons social media marketing is essential today
Social media marketing has some obvious disadvantages. For starters, you can’t simply force-feed people some sterile, canned messaging like you used to be able to, without expecting some form of reply. Or what worked tactically yesterday on one channel, is almost guaranteed not to work tomorrow on the next one. Thankfully, the positives far outweigh these negatives, though.
Here are five critical advantages of social media marketing.
1. Social media’s growing influence on search results
People visit social media to avoid work, leading to serendipitous discoveries. This characteristic makes social media less effective for direct sales than search engines. However, search results are increasingly shaped by social media, such as personalized YouTube results or Twitter search results for events. Social media content influences future engagement with brands.
2. Social media’s positive impact on organic traffic and revenue
AdRoll found that customers need 56 touchpoints before buying, often influenced by various media and recommendations. Social media boosts awareness and influence, helps manage online reputation, driving organic traffic. Quicksprout’s study showed higher social shares correlate with better search rankings. Chartbeat revealed that social media is the top referral source for content websites, surpassing search and direct traffic.
3. Social media provides inexpensive scale
Social media can significantly boost brand reach without paid media costs. It can also mitigate negative criticism by quickly spreading positive messages. For instance, Airbnb’s founder used social media to address a PR crisis effectively. Properly prepared social media can control and counteract bad news.
4. Social media facilitates direct connections with your audience
Social media removes barriers between brands and customers, enabling direct interactions. Consistent engagement is crucial for building these connections. Brands must be active on social media beyond campaigns and promotions to foster meaningful interactions.
5. Social media marketing is free (To a point)
Social media marketing doesn’t have direct costs, though there are opportunity costs in time and resources. As brands grow, they may hire social media teams or agencies. The organic benefits of higher search rankings and positive influence on brand perception are invaluable, exemplified by Google paying Apple to be the default search engine in Safari.
Effective tips on social media marketing
Marketing 101: The 4Ps
To better understand a social media marketing strategy, view it through the same 1960s lens as the 4Ps you learned on the very first day in Marketing 101:
1. Product: The goods or services offered to meet the needs of the target market.
2. Price: The cost consumers pay for a product.
3. Place: The distribution channels through which the product is sold.
4. Promotion: The activities that communicate the product’s features and benefits and persuade customers to purchase it.
Most marketers today focus on the bottom two Ps to drive business goals:
– Promotion: This includes all the various ways to generate interest for your business, including advertising, PR, direct sales, word of mouth, and more.
– Place/Distribution: To strategically locate your brand in channels where your ideal customers will discover it.
A social media marketing plan is like an amalgamation of those two classic marketing principles that have been around since the golden days of advertising.
Aligning business goals with social media marketing
Social media marketing perfectly aligns a brand’s business goals with how younger generations are already behaving. Sixty-odd years ago if you wanted to promote your widget, you focused on:
– Television ads across a handful of channels.
– Local radio ads.
– One of your city’s two newspapers.
– Catalogs in the mail.
Why? Because that’s where the generations’ eyeballs were glued and it’s what influenced their willingness and ability to fork over hard-earned greenbacks. But today? Nearly all of those industries are languishing, dying a slow, painful death. While at the same time, teens literally can’t stop watching YouTube or quit their daily feed scrolling. More U.K. teens watch Netflix than the BBC.
Earned, owned, and paid media
Again, let’s revisit a classic marketing oldie-but-goodie – earned, owned, and paid media – to illustrate how social marketing fits into a broader promotional strategy.
– Earned media: Social media still sits firmly in the “earned” camp, because while it doesn’t require a ton of out-of-pocket spending, it does require you to roll up your sleeves.
– Owned media: Channels like your existing customer database.
– Paid media: Ads and influencer rev-share agreements.
Social media marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Social media marketing also empowers search (SEO, visibility within each social network, recommendations from voice devices, and more). Social media networks are essentially content and information-sharing platforms. Each platform has its own search feature, allowing you to look up anything at any time.
This means that you can specifically optimize what you’re sharing to be found over and over again. This data can also be retrieved later for recommendations, not just for searching inside that one app, but from other apps and networks too (think: Alexa voice commands and more).
This is a critical point because it means you should also be optimizing content differently based on where you’re posting or sharing it. Meaning:
– Facebook: Now the go-to B2C community for the mass market, 30-something-and-up generations.
– Instagram: Focus on Instagram post ideas that emphasize visually engaging photos or image sharing.
– LinkedIn: B2B discussions, polls, and knowledge exchange.
– Pinterest: A visual bookmarking and favoriting app for lists of lists.
– Snapchat: “Exclusive,” short-form, time-based ephemeral videos.
– TikTok: Short-form entertaining, inspiring, or educational videos.
– Twitter: Rapid-fire, short-form info and link sharing with a relatively quick half-life.
– YouTube: The de facto video-sharing platform for both short and long-form content.
Final Thoughts
Social media marketing is essential for today’s businesses. It greatly impacts search results, organic traffic, and direct customer engagement, enhancing brand visibility and reputation. Despite challenges like adapting tactics and maintaining authentic engagement, the advantages of using social media outweigh these issues.
By aligning marketing strategies with promotion and distribution principles and understanding the link between social media and SEO, brands can effectively use these platforms to reach their business goals and connect with their audience.
