How to Use Social Media to Market Your Brand
Digital Marketing has been a buzzword in the advertising community for quite some time now, with many professionals hailing it as the next big thing. In the last few years however, digital marketing has been taking the limelight. Not only is it a growing segment of overall advertising, but many social networking sites are experimenting with new ways to advertise online. So which platforms should you be paying attention to?
A digital marketing company should be focusing on five main platforms. They are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn. Each one offers a unique opportunity to reach a wide audience and improve brand awareness. Twitter, for example, can drive huge amounts of traffic to your site, which can ultimately lead to more sales. The best social media management tools will integrate seamlessly into your SEO strategy, increasing the return on investment.
Twitter has recently added a feature that allows users to interact with one another more than they would with just an inbox full of posts. It takes this interaction even further by allowing people to retweet anything they choose, thus creating backlinks to their site. This means more people getting your links and increasing the possibility of click-through conversions. However, one important thing to remember is that Twitter isn't a real website. A good digital marketing company will take this into account and help you convert those backlinks into conversions.
Google+ is still in its experimental stage, but it has already proven itself to be a highly effective social media tool. Users can share any picture or video they like with the whole world. The platform also offers ad-tracking and analytics so companies can better understand their audience. Google's goal is to make all its products as useful as possible. Given its relatively cheap ad rates, digital marketing experts are already betting that Google+ will soon rival social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, which already have huge followings.
Google is one of the biggest search engines, so it makes sense to have strong Google+ presence too. A digital marketing course should teach you how to create targeted landing pages for your website and how to leverage Google's popularity to boost your SEO rankings. You can't just post whatever content and link to whatever page you want; Google's algorithms are such that what you put on your site will directly affect your ranking. A good SEO specialist will make sure that you're optimizing your pages properly.
A social media company might not give you the full visual effect that you'd get from Facebook, but a solid understanding of how to use the two platforms to your benefit is a must. Facebook is more directly connected to Google since almost everything is mentioned on both sites. Because Facebook has roughly twice the traffic of Google, you can leverage Facebook's +1 rating to drive more organic traffic to your website.
YouTube, while it's received a lot of negative press recently, is still a fantastic asset for both branding and digital marketing. With over one billion people watching the video sharing site every day, it's an amazing resource for brand building. If you haven't already created videos for YouTube, now is definitely the time. Using YouTube as part of your social media marketing campaign will give you a chance to reach a new client base. Many big name clients have used YouTube as a way to gain more exposure, without spending a lot of money. YouTube is a valuable resource for all internet marketing professionals.
Google+ is the last major social media platform we'll discuss in this article, as it offers the most integrated approach between online and offline marketing. Like Facebook, it's linked up with Google AdWords, which allows you to track performance across the board. Google+ does require a little more work than its competitors, but if you master the analytics available, you can benefit greatly from its integration with AdWords.
