Social media marketing is an approach that uses social media networks and platforms to advertise a website’s product or service. The main goal of social media marketing is to draw attention and traffic. Even though the terms e-marketing and digital marketing are still authoritative in the industry, social media marketing is gaining more and more popularity from users and searchers.
Different social sites have different social actions. For example, Twitter is a social media network created to engage people in sharing brief messages or “updates” with other users, while Facebook is an all-in-one social networking site that enables you to share updates, images, joining events and a diverse set of other activities.
The Relationship of Search and Social Media Marketing
As an online marketer who should be concerned about your search rankings, you might be asking how your search marketing is related to social media.
The truth is, the two are very closely related. Social media usually fills into the discovery of fresh content, such as news stories. If you know your search terms and purposes, you might already understand that “discovery” is a search activity. In just a matter of seconds, you can share content with people all over the globe. Another search related activity social media is capable of is building links that, in turn, aid into search engine optimization(SEO) efforts. Another fact you should consider is that many users also conduct searches at social media channels to obtain social media content. Social presence may also affect the relevancy of some search results, either inside or outside a social media network.
With all this data, you might already have a pretty good knowledge of what social media is all about, and how it runs. However, you must know that 96% of the people who talk about brands online do not actually follow the official profiles of these brands.
The questions are: Will you trust social media marketing? How effective is it?
The Effectiveness of Social Media Marketing
From the information we presented above, we can say that social media marketing as a medium for attracting clients. However, before you practice an approach, you must first know how precisely effective it is. And with the rare solid studies about the effectiveness of social media marketing, its liability as a driver of customer loyalty needs to be assessed in more measures than likes and retweets.
Before proceeding to the next info for your benefit, you might want to look at some of the statistics we have collected.
The number of people using each social media platform:
- Facebook- 2.072 billion (January 2018)
- LinkedIn- 500 million (January 2018)
- Instagram- 1 billion (2018)
- Twitter- 330 million (January 2018)
- YouTube- 1.3 billion active users
- Pinterest- 175 million (January 2018)
- Snapchat- 178 million daily active users (January 2018)
- Periscope- 2 million active users
Based on the quantities given, you might think that social media is the perfect method to approach customers, right? Well, not certainly.
Here are more data that would support our opinion:
77% of marketers are using at least one social media site to advertise their online business. Still, this does not certainly mean that there are producing a notable return on investment(ROI) from it, or getting the most out of social media in total. This survey was conducted by the Data and Marketing Association.
In 2017, only 38% of the respondents admitted that they were able to scale their social media actions. Only 42% of marketers on Facebook believe that their efforts are not in vain, which is a drop from 46% from the year 2016. This data is from the Social Media Marketing Industry report for 2017.
48% of marketers declared to have noticed a return on their investment with social media networks. This study implies that numerous marketers are either failing to interest their audience correctly in their respective social platforms, or they are not able to scale their social very efficiently. A third of the respondents neither admitted nor opposed the report, which proposes that they do not have a clear understanding of the social media ROI to acquaint their choice. This information is from Smart Insights.
CMOs score social media as 3.3 out of 7. 45% of them say that they are not able to determine the impact of social media in terms of how it gives an advantage to their firms.
Nearly 53% of the respondents of Simply Measured 2017 (The State of Social Marketing) declared that tracking engagement metrics is one of the most significant features that they scan for in a social analytics tool. 39.4% of them indicated that the capability to track conversions was the functionality that most of them sought after.
Final Thoughts
Even if there are many companies that cite the effectiveness of social media marketing, you should never forget to consider one of the most important parts. What we mean is your social marketing return on investment. We do not discourage you to use social media as a marketing strategy. The most mentioned people in the statistics above are the people who did not use the approach properly. You could be one of the people who can get the most out of social media marketing for your brand!
