Why you should be using social media marketing

How often do you post on social media? If your answer is 'rarely', you may want to rethink your marketing strategy. Did you know that 83 percent of marketers say social media is important for their businesses? It's not surprising. Social media is important to business because it's important to our culture.

In today's society, we desire a constant stream of content at our fingertips. We have an insatiable hunger for information; social media sustains us.  It's no wonder we're always scrolling through our newsfeeds. So, if social media is where everyone's looking for information, it's vital your business is always there to be found.

Why is social media the place to be?

• It's portable.  A third of internet users consider their smartphone to be the most important device for accessing the internet. Out of billions of social media users, almost 2 billion of them access their chosen social platforms on their mobiles.
• Its content is short and pithy. A recent study stated that humans have anattention span of only eight seconds. That's one second less than a goldfish. As a result, we desire lots of content that we are able to skim-read. We assess the value in mere seconds before deciding whether to continue reading or not.
• It's, well, social.Everything we read online can be posted across many social media platforms. This is a way of sharing and discussing interests with friends and like-minded people.

Because of this, social media is becoming an increasingly important route to market. There are 2.307 billion active social media users worldwide - that's just under a third of the world’s population. So, there's a good chance that the majority of your audience use at least one or two social media platforms. If you're smart, you'll join them.

How can social media benefit you?

Using the help of a social media marketing agency, or writing social posts yourself, is extremely beneficial for your business. Having an active presence on social media means you can:

• Promote your content. Instead of relying on your audience to find you, go to where they spend their social time online. Make it easier for them see you as a useful, interesting source by promoting short, shareable content, such asinfographics. Ensure everything you share is useful, educational and accessible.
• Interact with customers. It's important that your social media accounts sound as human as possible. Comments or messages allow for a natural, informal way of communicating. This is why67 percent of customers use social media for customer service. Having an active presence and humanised responses can help to build brand trust. After all, people like doing business with people.
• Generate leads.Sources show that social media has a 100 percent higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing. You can generate leads directly from your social media accounts, but also indirectly. If people share your content to their friends, they're effectively marketing on your behalf. They can reach parts of your audience that you may not have touched.

It's important to keep your audience in mind. You don't have to have an account on every single social media platform - stick to the ones that your personas are likely to use.

So for once there's actually a good excuse for logging into Facebook at work. Nice!