Social media marketing is a process of attaining attention, promoting your brand, increase website traffic and sales through social media websites. Brands and individuals simply achieve this by publishing engaging content on their social media channels, engaging with their followers, and running social media campaigns.

There are thousands of social media websites available. The most important social media channels based on user base are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest.

Ans: Social media helps businesses by building awareness of the business and its products. Social media can be used for customer engagement as customers can communicate directly with brands. Social media organic posts don’t cost anything so even smaller companies can afford them. And, social media paid campaigns are relatively cheaper than many other online campaigns. Social media reaches all demographics. Online adults aged 18-34 are most likely to follow a brand via social networking (95%).

Social media users are active and sharing among their friends and family can help you reach more audiences. Regularly engaging with your brand, makes you loyal thus it increases brand loyalty and value. Social media humanizes your brand. Apart from all these, it also increases your website traffic, generates leads, boosts sales, helps you reach influencers and improve your visibility, helps you promote your content, helps you tackle negative comments about your brand, a medium to understand more about the sentiment of your customers, and helps you keep an eye of your competitors.

Social media is so popular because there are multiple reasons people around the world use social media. 

The primary reasons are:

• It gives the possibility to stay connected with friends and family.
• It gives the opportunity to find and connect with new people.
• Social networking sites are free, and they implement various algorithms to find the type of content users might like and display similar types of content on their feed section.
• People use social media sites like Twitter to stay updated & connect with the brands they like.
• People use sites like LinkedIn for professional networking.
• Looking at beautiful visuals from people all over the place, share their photos with the help of sites like Instagram
• To learn new things, to kill time with the help of video entertainment.
• 54% of social browsers use social media to research products

While the natural assumption is that you should be on all the popular platforms, this can be counterproductive if not executed with a strategy. Instead, focus on a couple of platforms that are highly popular among your target audience. So the best platforms to use will vary for each business.

Social media does not directly contribute to SEO ranking, but the links you share across social platforms increase brand exposure. They add up and influence search engine optimization in six directions:

• Extensive content distribution
• Longer lifespan of your posts
• Improve online visibility and organic traffic
• Increase brand recognition.
• Enhance brand reputation
• Boosts local search engine optimization (SEO)

Although social media is not a ranking factor, it has a link to search engine optimization. In the above section, I explained how social media and SEO correlate, through social signals.

Those signals strengthen the factors Google considers when ranking a website. You can accumulate those signals in mass sharing on different social media sites. The more you share useful content across social media, the more your audience will likely share the posts with their friends and followers.

So, as the sharing continues, several people could link back to the posts. Collectively, the shared materials could increase your blog content visibility and SEO ranking. Google values quality links and deems them a part of the ranking factors.

There are several social media sites for SEO. These websites are ideal for SEO and social media marketing because they appear in searches and rank high on SERPs. For most consumers, if they want to connect or buy from a brand, they will first visit the company’s social media profiles, not its websites.

Why is that so? Because social media provides a more personal experience, and the response time is often quicker. Also, social media is more effective when connecting with your buyer persona. Consequently, consumers use different social platforms to obtain marketing insights about a company or organization for business purposes and other vital matters.