If You Own a Business, Social Media is Crucial to Its Success

Social media is more important than ever to your business. However, knowing what specific aspects of social media to concentrate on can be difficult. After all, social media is a broad term that encompasses many different things.

In order to make sure that your social media strategy is as effective as possible, it is important that you concentrate on what is hot right now in the world of social media. So what is hot? The following list outlines it for you:

Social Signals: When people share your content, it sends more traffic to your website. More traffic, means a higher SEO ranking. So while social media doesn’t directly affect your SEO, without it your SEO can certainly suffer. The takeaway? Organic, high-quality content is more important than ever.

Mobile Traffic: Last year, mobile traffic overtook desktop traffic in the United States and its usage shows no signs of slowing. Therefore, if it isn’t already, mobile needs to be your number one focus.

Data-Driven Targeting: With all of the valuable insights that can be gained through social media analytics and other reporting tools, there is simply no excuse for not personalizing your marketing messages to every one of your sales leads—including those on social media. Make no mistake, your competition is approaching your customers and prospects with a personalized message so you better be doing the same thing!

Response Times: Surveys show that consumers who reach out to companies via their social media sites do not like to be kept waiting. And unhappy customers demand the quickest response—less than an hour. If you are keeping your customers waiting you can be sure they won’t be your customers for long.

Engagement Matters: Research shows that social media influences customers’ buying decisions even more than retail websites. Further, the more engaged your customers are on your social media sites, the greater your sales numbers. That’s why it is so important that you work to make your social media sites commerce-driven. While buying over social media is still in its infancy, the day will come when you will need to implement such strategies. Until then, engaging customers via social media about your products and services will make the inevitable transition much smoother.

Live Streaming: Live streaming video is believed by many social media specialists to be the next big thing. Live streaming personalizes your brand on a whole new level because it is unedited and much more authentic.

Social media has endless potential but it requires a great deal of time and attention to do it right. This is time well spent, however, as the potential payoff is huge.