Four Benefits of Social Media Marketing That You Should Know About!

Every day, more and more people are turning to social media networks not only to share and post stories, videos, and images, but to track and analyze consumer or customer behavior on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumbler and many other social media platforms that engage millions of people, companies, and organizations around the world. Social media marketing has become very potent in giving companies a competitive edge in this Digital Era.

What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social media is a means for people to interact in the "online world". During the last decade, there was a surge in terms of popularity and usage of various social media networks like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter for example. It was coined the term "social media" as it is comprised of social interactions that include comments, feedback, conversations, and other user interactions and engagements.

Social media marketing is the process of gaining attention (traffic) via different social media platforms or sites. Different social media platforms have different mechanisms like Twitter for example was designed to send short updates and messages. YouTube was created to share videos. Facebook in contrast, was intended for content sharing be it in the form of text, videos, images, stories, and events. Social media marketing strategies are typically focused on creating content that attracts the attention of social media users and encourages them to share it on their social networks.

Four Benefits of Social Media Marketing
The implication of sharing in social media networks is that the source of information or content is reliable as it comes from a trusted, third party source and not the company or brand itself. There are many benefits that companies can gain by implementing a social media marketing strategy. Here are four benefits that you should know about.

1. Targeted audiences
It is easy for marketers to search for specific target markets in terms of age, gender, education, language, and among others as social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook have tools that will allow companies and individuals to communicate directly to a segmented social media users like Facebook groups or using hashtags.

2. Receive feedback in real time.
In the traditional marketing media, marketers have to wait for several weeks and even months in order to have a quick look on the impact of their marketing efforts. With social media, the response is immediate and thus marketers are able to reconfigure their marketing strategies to maximize the potential of the responses, well before the marketing campaign ends.

3. Helps build brand recognition and loyalty.
Facebook pages for example are just one of the social media networks that will help your brand, products, or services accessible to your customers. Frequent updating on Twitter will help social media users become more familiar with your company and the products/services you offer.

4. Allows you to easily convert visitors into leads.
Every engagement that you perform on social media platforms provides you with an opportunity for customers to be converted to your favor. You can build followers, new customers, and maintain old customers by just sharing stories, videos, events, and images.