Why use Social Media?

As the dominance of social media continues to rise, organizations of all types and sizes are recognizing the ways in which social media can help them better understand, respond to, and attract the attention of their target audience.

As a result, businesses are now jumping on the social media bandwagon at a rapid pace, embracing blogs, social networks, wikis, and other resources to achieve their marketing and public relations goals.

Inform Your Target Market Faster

Social networking gives us a faster, more precise why to share information. With old methods such as newspaper adverts, yellow pages and leaflet distribution, information can take days or even weeks to reach it’s target. Why? Because they have boundaries, regulations and can be very expensive.

Social media also provides more widespread yet specifically targetted coverage, enabling you to reach a much larger, relevant customer base than standard media outlets alone.

While newspaper readership and the number of available print publications continue to decline, the number of consumers using the Internet to access and share information continues to rise sharply. For example, one recent study showed that almost one out of every four Internet users – over 41 million people total in 2006 – visits MySpace on a regular basis.

Improve Brand Awareness

Social media, can be a highly useful tool for enhancing both awareness and image of your company. Networking can help “spread the word” about your company, its products, and its services to more people, dramatically increasing brand recognition and awareness and fundamentally increasing sales.

Additionally, as Social Media Bournemouth experts, it can also enable us to gather input and feedback directly from your target audience, and use that intelligence for more effective reputation management. Insight into why people like – or hate – a brand is needed to help change and control audience perceptions and preferences of your business.

Increase Website Traffic and Boost SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a key component of today’s direct marketing and lead generation strategies, and social media has proven its ability to significantly complement SEO initiatives.

Many social media techniques – such as frequent use of common jargon and key phrases, title tags, ticker symbols, and links to blogs and other relevant Web content – can dramatically improve search engine rankings.

Additionally, while SEO relies on just a handful of popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo to drive target prospects to a site, Social Media Bournemouth expands the potential audience by creating alternate channels.

For example, when content is published to a site, and that content is then linked to from del.icio.us or reddit, it can generate a tremendous boost in Web traffic. Many companies also find it much easier to generate compelling content that is likely to be picked up by bloggers, than it is to keep up with the “rules” required to rank high in today’s popular search engines.