Social media, as a marketing tactic, may still be in its infancy, yet, it's difficult to imagine life without social platforms.
Social media marketing can be great for creating an online brand presence and keeping in touch with your loyal customers. But how important is social media marketing really?
For the sake of this post, let's take a look at what life would look like for your brand if you didn't use social media marketing and what areas the medium impacts.
1. People would trust you less
If you're using social media correctly, it will become more than just another place for you to promote and sell your products. Your social channels will become the platforms you use to build relationships with your customers.
Customers like to interact with brands that have a personality, they like brands that spark and join interesting conversations, without a hidden agenda.
If you didn't use social media marketing, then people may well trust you less because they wouldn't be able to see the human side of your brand.
Additionally, a recent study discovered that 63% of respondents look up products and brands on social media before making purchases. If you didn't use social media marketing, these people wouldn't be able to find out more about you, and therefore would be more likely to purchase from a brand that did utilize social platforms.
2. You'd be less popular
On social media, popularity is everything. For example, let's say you search for 'the health benefits of green tea' and you find an article that's been retweeted 400 times, and another that's been retweeted 4 times. You're more likely to read the most popular result - this is because popularity on social media also reflects authority. Every share, retweet, and like on social media is priceless, and if you didn't use social media marketing, you'd miss out on the 63% of people that share branded content with their followers.
Your popularity would further decrease if you didn't use social media because your customers wouldn't be able to contact you as easily. Studies have found that 58% of people engage with brands on social media, pointing to the notion that you should always be readily available to your followers.
3. You'd struggle to drive traffic
Social media sites have higher daily user statistics than your typical websites. A lot higher. This makes them a great source of referral traffic.
If you didn't use social media, and instead you simply relied on your blog and organic clicks, you'd notice a substantial decrease in traffic.
Social media provides access to a huge pool of potential customers - you can put your helpful content out like a rubber ring for social media users to clutch and use as a device to find your website.
In short, there's no other way to reach as many potential customers in one convenient place.
4. Your content wouldn't live up to its full potential
Did you know that branded content on social media influences up to 81% of consumers to buy a company's product or service?
If you failed to utilize your content on social media, you could potentially miss out on millions of customers.
However, simply posting content to social media isn't enough, you need to be tactful with it. You need to know what kind of content performs well on each platform - for example, visual content excels on Facebook.
In addition to this, you also need to know when to post. For more information on that, take a look at this QuickSprout infographic.
5. You wouldn't be able to leverage influencers
On social media, influencers run the show. Influencers are brands or individuals that have a huge following of dedicated fans on social. Leveraging influencers enables brands to build audiences much faster than they could alone.
If you didn't use social media marketing, you'd miss out on the main benefits that building relationships with influencers can bring.
Final Thoughts
If you didn't use social media marketing, it's pretty clear that your brand would be missing out on some significant opportunities.
Love it or hate it: social media marketing works, and it's here to stay.