Why You Need Social Media for Your Business?

Social Media: Is it really important to your business?

Social media business started in early 2002 and its presence is not arguable. All brands have definitely realized the importance of social media and accepted that social media marketing should be integral part of their marketing but questioned continuously coming into the mind about its benefits and effectiveness.

According to comScore statistics of 2013, Malaysia’s social media penetration is 41%. But for Malaysian market, It is still like a newborn that every marketer wants to adopt to get their message out to their target markets but still struggling to find the right way. Some brands in Malaysia only know about it through agency recommendation – their competitors are on social media so they too have to get on these platforms, and they do without fully understanding the risks. For example, Face book can never be used for customer care services because organic reach is very very low, approximately 2 to 5%.

But the major problem is finding a social media “strategist” who knows the brand completely, knows the benefits and limitations of social media channels, has an acquisition mindset and will help to increase presence on social media.

1. It is much cheaper than traditional advertising. That’s the main advantage of social media marketing (Max RM0.01/reach) so any brand with a low budget can target consumers and reduce marketing expenses.

2. Relevant and compelling content will get attention of potential customers and increase brand visibility.

3. You can respond almost instantly to any issues of your brand so that you can change negativity into positivity and use them as WOM (word of mouth) amplification.

4. You can Increase loyalty and convert them into referral marketing.

5. You can increase web traffic.

6. You can generate leads.

7. You can improve your search engine ranking.
Many marketers want immediate sales from social media but they don’t understand the 3 major pillars of social media:

1. Content
2. Community
3. Context (delivering the right content, to the right person at the right time).
If social media community will accept your content in a right context then your business will grow on its own and then there will be no more marketing cost, it’s a win-win situation.

Just try to increase the intersection area these three metrics as per below image.

Recommendation:

Use these basic 5 steps to make your social media strategy better:

1. Look for specific target market behaviour of your brand and get useful insight about content marketing.
• Facebook Audience Insight
• Twitter Analytics

2. Choose context carefully, which is suitable to your business
• Twitter trends
• Current trends in TV/Radio/Newspaper

3. Determine your goals
• Be specific to get what you want out of it.
• How do you measure success?

4. Set benchmarks
• Pages to Watch

5. Wait, test and optimize steps 1 and 2.

If you’re wondering if social media marketing is right for your business, the verdict is in… Social media is a great way to drive repeat business and to attract new customers.