There is so much more to social media marketing than just getting your name and brand out there. Not that those aren’t important goals, but if you fail to leverage everything else SM has to offer, you are leaving a lot of money on the table. Let me give you just 2 examples of ways you could be leveraging your SM presence to do so much more.
If you leverage your social media presence skilfully, you can be seen as a partner, problem solver and though leader, not just a seller.
Engaging with people – not just your market – on social media can do something wonderful. It can change how people see your brand. Of course you want your customers to like and trust your brand, but that is only half the story.
The other half is that you are not just interacting with customers and potential customers. Everyone who sees a social media post becomes part of the equation, and you’ll be changing the way people who will never buy from you feel about your brand. Why is that important? Because partner businesses are not immune to social media influence. They are made up of people just like everyone else, and improving their opinion of your organisation can have far reaching and incredibly important repercussions.
Do you know who else you are influencing with your SM presence? Talent. Recruits. Call them what you will, if potential new hires gain a better feeling about your brand even before they apply or are approached, imagine how things could be different! Ask your HR people how important it is to have your employees feel good about your brand and the organisation behind it. Go ahead, we’ll wait.
Now, about your audience – growing your audience is fine, but imagine turning them into a real interactive, self-reinforcing community!
We all know that one of the most important factors of a marketing campaign is to grow your audience, and SM has huge potential to do just that. Last year, there were 4 and a half billion social media users worldwide. You don’t even need to divide that up into channels, because you can interact with all of your SM channels at the same time. Your addressable market is half the planet! Once you demonstrate thought leadership on issues they care about, many of those billions will become your actual audience.
But again, that is only half the job. SM marketing lets you do something almost unheard-of by traditional marketing techniques. It lets you consciously and tactically build a community. Not a notional community either, but an actual network of people who interact not just with your brand but with each other. A viral post is like a flash of lightning, but a community is a lantern in the darkness. It begins to generate its own content, and solve its own problems, it self-reinforces and self-recruits. And it does all of that in your name.
That is just a taste of what a properly leveraged social media presence can do. Want to learn more? Check back here often.
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