Social media is an important part of online marketing
Social media has emerged as a dominant factor in the lives of teens and young adults in Ireland, Britain and around the world. However what might surprise many people is the extent to which older adults use social media and mobile social media in their daily lives.
Social media optimisation is the process of integrating a social media presence into a company’s marketing efforts. It can involve direct advertising – however for most industries, this is pretty unproductive in terms of a favourable return on investment. Facebook, as the world’s premier social network, lacks serious click-through in terms of advertising and advertising on Twitter is an expensive business commanding million-dollar budgets.
Using social media to promote your business
Advertising on social media seems like a natural path to promoting your business but it’s limited in so far as social media users are not actively searching for products or services, and so view ads as a nuisance. With search engines, the opposite is the case as searchers are actively looking for products and services – they want to be pitched to and they are already some way qualified as a sales lead.
The value of social media for Irish businesses is extending the reach of your brand amongst the demographic groups that make up your target audience. It can be a slow process generating the right audience through social media channels. Getting the kind of traffic that may actually result in sales, or at least brand awareness amongst your target audience is the challenge of social media optimisation.
Tapping into your existing customer base through social media is probably the quickest and easiest way of reaching new prospective customers. Incentivising social media interaction is another avenue worth considering – this might be met with reluctance, but given that social media is free to engage in, it makes sense to take some sort of reasonable financial hit in order to generate new business – especially given that social media is significantly more cost-effective than traditional advertising such as radio, television and print media.
