Earlier social media marketing was paid ads, with Facebook and Twitter being the primary platforms of choice here. Services come and go, user paces rise and fall, and living platforms go in and out of favor. Along with these changes, the authorities and regulations for any given forum can change at a moment’s notice.
While all of that may drive it sound like social media is a losing bid for your marketing endeavors— but it is not entirely agreeable.
Indeed, social media isn’t the juggernaut it utilized to be, with user numbers dwelling relatively fixed at ~250 million users. However, global numbers suggest a different story, with a 9% year-over-year rise to nearly 3.5 billion users worldwide. So when it arrives in your marketing efforts, it’s true that things have changed, meaning it may pay to adapt and roll with the changes.
However, with just an occasional tweak to their algorithms, these services have changed the likelihood of your target audience ever noticing your ads. The most current change has been to a more genuine and personal experience. The networks have responded with further modifications to their feeds to emphasize these one-on-one interactions.
Today we’re heading to look a little deeper at this tendency of increasing engagement between companies and their clients, both existing and potential, and what impact it should be holding on your social media marketing technique.
Transition From Paid Ads to Organic Social Engagement
This transition is due chiefly to one factor: social platforms modified their algorithms to feature content from people’s supporters and accounts they’ve committed with in the past over corporate content or paid ads. The causes behind this shift are a hotly argued topic that we’re not proceeding to wade into today. Suffice it to convey we’re prominent fans because this authorizes companies to flex their brand mouthpiece and character in unique and stimulating modes.
By emphasizing the organic essence of the discussions, a company can create noteworthy strides in boosting its spread by entertaining followers with witty back-and-forth conversations alongside great industry details and answers to the distress points they understand their users hold.
However, all this great news comes with a caveat—watch out for the “digital Detox” impact. People are bombarded by their social media feeds all day, and a growing number are taking to unplugging for a time. They’re spending more time and energy tending their friend lists when they come back. Promote your audience with great content and enthralling conversations to confirm they remain followers after doing such a social media purge.
Perfect Moment to Stimulate Social Media Presence
SEO: Google operates three main principles when resolving how much SEO draws to deliver a domain; they name it EAT SEO, abbreviated for Expert, Authority, and Trustworthy. There is no more suitable way to increase these three factors on an ongoing basis than to cultivate your social media presence. By delivering excellent content and entertaining readers on other platforms with links that direct them to that awesome content, you’re simultaneously helping all 3 of the EAT factors. Of course, we’ll have better to say about EAT subsequently.
Genuineness: Social media is an excellent venue for brand awareness drives. By expressing your brand voice while also bringing the human presence behind the brand, you’ll prove your authenticity to your audience like you are to Google through EAT. Engross with your followers as yourself, and they’ll come to count you as their go-to source for notification on your industry as well as your product/service. It’s a fact that people charge people additionally than they do corporate entities, so show them a human to estimate, and they’ll track you anywhere.
Customer service: Increasingly, people are taking to social media to air their grievances with companies and products and find assistance and support. Having a reliable customer service account available to field these searches, with documented support hours and everything, shows your customers that you value their time and are willing to satisfy them where they are to help.
Organic Social Media Marketing
Expertise: Show your knowledge; in your industry, with your product, and of your audience. It will keep them engaged and return for more relevant and valuable information and great conversations. Assisting people with their pain points is the most comfortable way to engender the kind of trust you’re striving for, so using your expert understanding is a sure-fire way to get started.
Authority: As you expand your domain authority by directing relevant links to your website, you also increase your authority in your readers’ eyes when the content they find resumes to help them with those pain points. Tweet about your most contemporary product update with facts about how it’s better than ever. Or compose a Facebook post that outlines a how-to guide for getting a particularly troublesome problem you know is meeting folks in your audience.
Reliability: The foremost goal is to become an entrusted advisor to your audience. The more helpful information you share, and the more solutions they find in your content, the more ensconced you’ll become in a trusted advisor position.
Final Thoughts
Social media has transformed the world for more promising and worse in the past few years. If you want to continue making the most of its power to exploit people as a marketing tool, you can earn a few adjustments to your plan to maintain up with the changes being made by the platforms themselves. However, we’re sure you can continue seeing great results from your activities on these social networks well into the future with a few tweaks here and there.