By Nidhi Dave
Social media is ever-changing, evolving and taking up new roles along with changing the way entrepreneurs do business. It is an unavoidable part of our lives now. Social media gave rise to the concept of social media marketing, which gradually gained popularity. Social media marketing is providing tremendous opportunities to businesses, helping them enhance profitability. It allows access to a large customer base for promoting and marketing their offerings. The widespread popularity of social media marketing has spurred a few misconceptions as well. This post lists and busts a few of such myths to help you strengthen your social media marketing.
Social media marketing is free
While joining social media is free, it does require adequate investment just like other marketing channels. You need to pay for specific services or tools like paid campaigns. You have to invest your time into research and ongoing effort, which is very valuable. It is essential to account for the time spent in developing different platforms and implementing strategies. The more effort you put, the higher ROI you will be able to realize.
You have to join every network
Once businesses start with their social media marketing campaign, they consider joining every social networking platform to reap the benefits. It is, however, a false assumption that every platform will be valuable for your brand. You need to analyze and identify which social networks are yielding the best results and are worth your time. Research on all those platforms that your target audience uses, frame a strategy for only the chosen networks and offer valuable information to your niche.
Social media is only for millennials
Millennials are not the only ones contributing to the traffic and increasing engagement on social media. Due to a rise in the awareness of these platforms, users of different age groups are active on them now. Research says, 40% of the Facebook’s active users are over the age of 35, and 52% of the 55-64 year old internet users have joined a social network. So, if businesses don’t consider a social networking site, thinking it doesn’t cater to their target audience’s age group, they might not be able to leverage its benefits.
Social media doesn’t help in generating revenues
Social media can actually help you to generate value beyond just engagement and brand awareness. It can drive sales and revenue if you create a strategy and implement your social media plan effectively. This, however, doesn’t happen overnight and requires time and patience. By selecting the right platform, promoting your business on it and continuously measuring the results, you will be able to enhance your sales and revenues.
As per a research by Hubspot, 62% of the companies using LinkedIn, 52% of the companies using Facebook and 44% of the companies using Twitter for marketing have acquired a customer from the platforms respectively. Revenue increased for 24% of the businesses when they utilized social media for lead generation.
More number of followers ensure success
Having a good number of followers is a sign of popularity for a brand, but that shouldn’t be your only objective. Engaging the audience is equally important. It doesn’t matter how many followers you have until you can’t convert them into customers. You need to make continuous efforts to build brand visibility and ensure that your followers take a call-to-action for your business.
Using a lot of hashtags are crucial
It is important to understand that hashtags can’t make your social media marketing strategy work. They only help to join common conversation threads. While it’s good to have a couple of hashtags in your post, don’t overdo it as it can cause an adverse effect on your brand’s image. Also, don’t become impatient if your hashtag doesn’t become a trending topic.
Social media isn’t related to other strategies
Social media marketing strategy can work best alongside other interrelated strategies like digital marketing, content marketing, etc. It can succeed only if you consider other factors like SEO, content creation, influencer marketing, brand advocacy and more. These factors give a boost to your social media efforts, multiplying your reach and enhancing your brand image. For example, to direct your traffic from social media, you should have a dynamic and fully-functional website.
If you want to succeed in social media marketing, you need to pursue it without any bias. To instill effectiveness in your social marketing efforts, myth-busting is important as half-lies can lead to negative consequences. Your focus should be on engaging users, providing value to them, and building a brand image, considering all the above myths baseless. Create a strategy, focus on your target audience, track your KPIs and bring changes in the strategy if needed to achieve the desired results!
Nidhi Dave is working as a content and brand strategist at ProDesigns – a graphic design company, recommending strategies to meet customers’ goals and deliver a superior user experience. She provides content leadership, ensuring that a consistent brand message is delivered to the audience.
Media marketing stock photo by Lenka Horavova/Shutterstock
