What is your social media marketing objective?

Everything that a business does must have a purpose and using social media marketing is no different. If your social media activities are not bringing your revenue, directly or indirectly, they are taking time away from other, more productive, things. So what is your social media marketing objective?

Using social media to sell

Getting customers is primarily why most businesses use social media. Attracting customers to your website or Facebook page is the first step in getting them to purchase your goods or services. Your strategy must therefore be providing tantalising offers to entice customers to your site.

Using social media to build reputation

Building your reputation and brand is another key reason to use social media. Here you provide expert information into the “blogosphere” that attracts readership and and establishes you or your business as market leaders. Understand what information your best customers want and build a content strategy to deliver it.

Your content strategy is to provide information to your customers that shows them that you are the best business delivering your product or service. Credential yourself as a market leader, the expert, providing the most knowledge. You establish yourself as a leader and customers will come to you for your product.

Using social media to manage reputation

Larger businesses use social media to monitor the conversations about their brand and to  directly engage with customers and potential customers. This way they can remedy any problems with customers before they become viral. Small businesses can encourage dissatisfied customers to make their complaints online so that they can be sorted out before they damage your reputation.

Using social media for customer retention

Social media offers a fantastic way of keeping in touch with your existing customers (and in the same way potential customers). Your posts will appear in their feeds and it keeps you in their thoughts when the next purchase is needed.  This is perhaps the best of social medias benefits and the easiest to do.

Using social media for search engine optimisation

Posting links on social media sites is a key way to build your site’s ranking with the search engines. This is important but should always be done consistently with your overall strategy, make sure you use the appropriate content.

 A social media strategy for your business

The reality is that you will want social media to do many things for you. You may have several objectives. Just don’t lose sight of why you are doing it. Use these tips to work out your social media marketing objective.