More and more businesses are looking to social media as a major part of their marketing strategy but it’s hard to get right. Social media is a rapidly changing area of marketing and sometimes it’s the greatest challenge is keeping up with how it all works and how to use it to advertise your business.
How Social Media is Changing
Social media is a very powerful advertising platform. A major advantage is audience: a huge portion of the population engage regularly with social media and you can reach highly targeted audiences. But the days when you could build an audience and expect to reach them organically are gone. An effective social media marketing campaign is an investment as much as more traditional media.
Facebook is a prime example of why this is happening. There are now 16 million people using Facebook in Australia and so much content is being produced that Facebook’s algorithm that decides what each person sees now only selects around 10% of content from friends and liked pages to go in a feed. If someone has liked your page, there is no guarantee that they’ll see your content. The only way they’ll see it organically is if you post regularly and your audience regularly engages with your content. What this means is, businesses have to invest in advertising to get noticed.
Two Methods of Social Media Advertising
There are a few different ways of reaching audiences with social media. One of the main factors in deciding on an advertising method, is whether you’re trying to reach existing customers, or find new ones.
To engage your existing audience (as with EDMs and newsletters) you need to spend on developing content, graphic design, scheduling posts and responding to engagement. And, when using Facebook, to make sure they see it in their feeds, it’s important to ‘boost’ posts to ensure they are seen.
To engage a new audience you need to pay for advertising (just like purchasing billboard space or media placements) and it’s important to make a significant investment. Once, $5 would actually get you significant reach. Now, as Facebook becomes more commercialised and busy, a decent budget is the only way to expect substantial returns from Facebook advertising.
Have a Goal
Like all forms of marketing, it’s important to have a goal with social media. Do you want to sell more of a product? Do you want to keep clients informed? Do you want to provide a medium for support or customer engagement? It’s important to have a clear vision of where you’re going so you can design your social media advertising strategy to meet it.
If you need help creating a strategy to achieve the result you’re after gocrossmedia are well equipped to present effective solutions.
