What Is Social Media Marketing?

By now, you've certainly heard of social media marketing. You might have even experimented with it some to see if it would help you generate new leads or clients. Most small business owners, however, give up on social media marketing before it really begins to bear fruit, or else they limp along with a few under-utilized social media accounts that never seem to make much difference to their bottom line. In this article, we'll address how social media marketing has evolved to become one of the most important marketing tools available and why even the smallest business needs a social media marketing strategy. What Social Media Marketing Is Today Perhaps you've heard some of the incredible social media statistics already:

• If Facebook were a country, it would be the third most popular nation on Earth – right behind China and India, much larger than the United States
• 50% of the average Internet user's time online involves some sort of social media engagement
• The fastest growing segment of social media users is people 35 to 64
• There are thirteen times more images on Flickr than in the Library of Congress
• 33% of women between 18 and 34 check Facebook as soon as they wake up, even before going to the bathroom
• In 2009, one in every six marriages were couples who met via social media

Are you getting the picture? Businesses who aren't engaged in social media marketing are missing out on huge opportunities. How Businesses Are Successfully Using Social Media Social media is more than another way to advertise your business' products and services. Here are the ways that smart businesses are using social media marketing to boost their bottom lines:

• Building customer relationships: Blogs, Facebook pages, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube are ways to build relationships with customers. We all understand the old adage that we buy from people we like. Social media gives businesses a chance to put a human face on the business and build rapport with customers.
• Improving customer support: Many businesses are using social media channels to support their customers and answer product questions online. Big businesses like Best Buy are saving millions of dollars each year with innovative social media support, but even small businesses can improve customer support using social media.
• Viral promotions: Social media is also a great channel to promote a new product or service and encourage fans to share the offer with their friends.

Why Your Business Needs a Social Media Marketing Strategy Small businesses across the country are discovering that successful social media marketing is more complex than they first thought. It's not enough just to open up a Facebook page, get some fans, and then sit back as the revenue pours in. In fact, the software firm Media Badger recently examined 4,000 small businesses in the United States and Canada and found that more businesses fail at social media marketing than succeed. Media Badger identified a number of reasons why small businesses fail at social media, but surprisingly, only 31% had to do with a lack of financial or human resources. The other 70% was related to a lack of understanding of social media, incorrect assumptions, poor content, and an unwillingness or else inability to commit the time needed to social media development. Why reinvent the wheel? Ultimately, it is a better investment of your time and money to outsource social media marketing to Internet marketing experts than to try to handle social media marketing on your own and fail. Contact us – we'll help you build a social media marketing strategy, then we'll execute that plan. If you want to execute it yourself, we'll coach you until you have all the know-how you need to succeed at social media marketing.