The use of social media enables marketers the opportunity to increase brand awareness and engagement with its intended audience. “72% of marketers use social media to create and develop loyal fans” (Wolf,2015). Developing an effective social media strategy creates more opportunities for marketers through increasing awareness, improving brand loyalty/authority, increasing engagement, distributing more content, and creating more opportunities to convert visitors.
Social media enables marketers the opportunity to increase the visibility of its brand through select channels. Marketers are able to focus on generating authoritative content to generate conversation and engagement which can help brands connect to its audience to build loyal relationships. Social media also enhances these relationships through helping brands address any concerns or questions customers may have.
Developing a loyal audience through social media creates even more opportunities for brands. Through having a loyal audience, there are more opportunities to convert. Generating content can lead to a site visit and eventually into conversions. “Building your followers on social media improves conversion rates, and the more followers and fans a business has, the higher the trust and credibility of the brand” (Wolf,2015). Increasing a brand’s loyal audience presents more opportunities for loyal users to become brand advocates through sharing content. This promotion on quality content helps lead users back to a website and even creates new website visits. More traffic with quality content means more opportunities at converting new visitors into loyal users.
The use of web analytics can help measure a brand’s social media impact. Measuring the impact of social can be challenging especially without any social media goals and KPIs. To properly evaluate social media initiatives, a brand must classify its traffic through definitions such as social networking, social new, social reviews, social bookmarking, social media sharing, social knowledge and guest blogs.
Through properly defining its social media, a brand is able to effectively segment its data. Furthermore, advance segmentation of social media is available through Google Analytics. “Segmenting social media traffic is like dividing up Smarties with your friends by color. Each have a similar characteristic (the color), but the things that differentiate them are things that we find out late (taste). This is concept is the same with social media sites, which may not be as apparent to start, but gradually you will understand their similarities and differences” (Lo). Through segmentation, marketers are able to see what types of social media definitions are generating the strongest traffic and resonating with visitors. Furthermore, the use of Channel Grouping can provide deeper insights into what social media definitions are helping in regard to conversion rate.
The use of social media can help enhance a brand’s SEO strategy. Certain social media practices can help a brand boost its SEO. These practices include growing the numbers of followers, encouraging external inbound links, and optimizing posts through searches.
The first practice revolves around the fact that the total number of followers and connections to social media profiles can have a significant influence on rankings. A company with a small following on Twitter or Facebook won’t have the ranking bonus as a mega-corporation with millions of followers. However, quantity over quality is not always good to value. Google is able to detect the quality of followers meaning buying proxy Twitter followers is not going to help. A brand needs to focus on building a strategy that may be slow, but is consistent in gaining new followers.
The next practice involves encouraging external inbound links. “Social media is also useful because it encourages more external sites to link to your content, and the more diverse external links you have, the more authority you’ll gain in Google’s eyes” (DeMers,2015). The goal is to create high-quality content that is authoritative, visible and can be shared that improves a brand’s social reputation.
The last practice revolves around optimizing post for search. Most of this strategy relies upon pre-existing content, but can be used to open a secondary search. Google favors popular social media updates in the top sections of its SERPs. Brands need to focus on generating posts that are optimized.
DeMers, J. 6 Social Media Practices That Boost SEO. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2015/01/27/6-social-media-practices-that-
Lo, J. Measuring Social Media Impact with Web Analytics. Retrieved from http://online-behavior.com/analytics/social-media-impact
Wolf, D. The Real Power of Social Media Marketing. Retrieved from https://www.b2bmarketing.net/resources/blog/real-power-social-media-marketing
Image . The importance of being social on social media – Pivot Communication | Integrated Marketing & Branding Agency. Retrieved from http://www.pivotcomm.com/insights/the-importance-of-being-social-on-social-media