We are often confronted with a prevalent question regarding the value social media holds.
Some look at it as an untapped opportunity and some refer to it as one of frustration with it being considered as a burden, it can be difficult to find the right justification for why social media is important.
Whatever be the industry and organization size, a consistent question we have been asking over the years is what level of social media effort a brand should be putting their money in. This investment is thought of in regard to internal resources and seriousness to content, posting, roles, and volume.
It also incorporates the hard expenditures like outsourcing the strategy and implementation to a consultant or agency and what the ROI looks like on that investment.
Reputation Management
Numerous social media sites – especially for B2C businesses – also act as review and rating websites.
If you’re unknown to which social sites your audiences are using and reviewing on within your industry, you could miss out on the chance to leverage reviews for your benefit.
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Plus, you could also miss the negative reviews that you have the chance to respond to and address professionally to win the reputation your company deserves.
PR
Social media is an outstanding vehicle for passing down important company news and messages.
LinkedIn helps in creating more professional and press release-like communications, but beyond the corporate feeling content, you are capable of leveraging multiple social networks to obtain positive news out to the customers, prospects, and stakeholders about what the company is up to beyond making a profit.
Never commit the mistake of ignoring or underestimating the impact of social on amplifying PR.
SEO
There’s plenty of information (and misinformation as well) about the role of social media on SEO. In spite of the debates over causation, correlation, and whether there are signals built directly into search engine algorithms that connect to social media, there’s consensus within digital marketing that if you’re working on SEO, you should be planning about social as well.
Local Search
Numerous social platforms are included in the local search ecosystem. By focusing on the right social media sites that match with importance for local search in your industry, you can maintain the significance of both and plan the right strategy for data accuracy and ongoing posting and engagement.
Funnel Development
Though I don’t expect the number of last-click conversions to be greater in social than other sources, I do have to contemplate how social media adjusts into the funnel and customer journey.
When we are putting efforts to give a social strategy a trial and objectively watch at assisted conversions, user journey paths, and different attribution models we’ll know how social media has an impact in the conversion funnel.
Agile Marketing
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Instead of investing six months and six figures into a big content project, consider trying out the smaller pieces, find out how the audience responds, and utilize that information to guide the continuing investment in content. Social media is the apt place to experiment with pieces of content, ideas, and judge interest and engagement as it is cheap, quick, and easy to deploy within.
Prospecting
Estimated to some other digital marketing channels, social channels have a different type of reach.
Search depends on the people looking for what we have to offer when they switch in a specific query.
Email marketing is bounded to our existing audience if we’re not buying lists.
Even if the sponsored and advertising options on sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook/Instagram, we can spread our prospect audiences proactively in methods that we are not able to in other channels.
Thought Leadership
If one of your aims is to build and establish thought leadership over the passage of time, then social media platforms can help you the best. While the majority of the content we’re writing, likely is posted and housed on our own sites that set us as an industry leader, if we’re just attaching it on our sites, we’re kind of just speaking about ourselves.
Gaining Industry Insight
Across the focus of our own posting and efforts to win more attention, engagement, and ROI, we can even listen and learn a lot in social media. By keeping a check on your competitors, using social listening tools to keep tabs on shifts in your audience, and becoming engaged ourselves and through our companies, we can get insights. These insights can help in strategy planning, inspiring the content, helping with product decisions, and fan out into bigger marketing intelligence initiatives.
Recruitment
Your content is important to job seekers. LinkedIn is one of the well-known recruiting tools available out there. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other sources are also useful for showing what the company’s culture is like and help persuade candidates on their decision to join your organization.
Conclusion
The resolution on how much time, capital, and focus to invest in social media trickles down to the question of “why?” and “is it worth it?” Above 10 reasons throw some light on why social is significant even in industries that are very traditional or that do not have a clear last-click conversion showing immediate ROI.
