“You can’t just open a website and expect people to flood in. If you want to succeed you have to create traffic.“
~ Joel Anderson, Walmart CEO
Social media has changed the business world.
Suddenly, marketing a business is not limited to talking to people, it is talking with people.
The unilateral selling argument is now a multi-directional community conversation. The power to control the brand message has been largely removed from the hands of a company.
Social media marketing, or SMM, is about commitment. It is the opportunity for a company to communicate with its customers and build a long-term customer relationship based on communication and trust.
Today, the customer-business relationship is biased towards the customer, with each person having the ability to publicly express concerns and attract media attention, because every person is now a media publisher.
If you’re not speaking directly to your audience through social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, you’re missing the train!
As a result, companies must do their best to maintain positive conversation in their intervention. A company can not stifle all public demonstrations of dissatisfaction; However, by applying SMM strategies, a company can promote a message that speaks of its customer service successes by a careful awareness and dedication to meet the needs of customers.
That’s why SMM is a powerful and necessary tool for all brands today. Education and services provided by SMM professionals can help a company improve its presence and develop a positive reputation online.
Making social media work for your business
So what can a company do?
With the help of qualified SMM experts, a company can optimize its presence in social media. Social media marketing is run across many platforms, some of the popular platforms being a blog, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and YouTube.
However, before a company engages in a particular platform, research must be done to determine where the target audience is active online, and create a social media strategy to reach it in the relevant spaces. SMM services begin by researching the social media platforms where the intervention will produce the greatest results.
A strategic SMM company can help you develop and implement social media policies and practices that support community awareness, reputation management and brand loyalty.
Develop a strategy for social media
An SMM company must adapt SMM strategies to the needs of each business. Take a local bakery, for example. A bakery has success by optimizing its presence in Yelp and inviting customers to examine its cakes and pastries on the social network. The bakery can also find value in Twitter by “tweeting” a word of the day that will offer the first 10 customers a free cake if they come to the store and say the “magic” word.
In this SMM strategy, Yelp is used as a platform to build reviews that reflect the brand as an established business with reliable products and services. Yelp offers an added bonus for the business because it is a trusted brand for Google’s local map service, the most popular search engine.
Meanwhile, Twitter is used to entice people to visit the shop via rewards. In addition, Twitter is a communication incentive, encouraging people to become friendly with brand representatives and share tweets with their connections.
Users of social media platforms use each of them differently, and the rules of engagement are widely defined by the users themselves. This is why SMM professionals understand that SMM services are not the same for everyone.
