Social Media the Quintessential Marketing Tool!

Social media is used by billions of people around the world and has become one of the defining technologies of our time. Given the massive potential audience available who are spending many hours a day using social media across the various platforms, it is not surprising that marketers have embraced social media as a marketing channel. Social media may have started as a way to keep in touch with friends, but it’s become a valuable tool for marketing. As the number of people on social media continues to rise, the potential audience grows as well.
The increasing amount of time people spend on their phones and on social media provides greater opportunities for brands to advertise their content. Besides this simple fact, there are several other reasons why social media is the future of marketing.

• Not only is it efficient, it also provides a wide customer reach. Some people use more than just one social media app, the audience is much more diverse than other platforms. It is also easy to reach your target audience through social media.
• Social media pages can help establish your brand name, increase your business visibility, and brand recognition. 
• Along with this, you can upgrade your customer services. You can take feedback, suggestions, and concerns from the customers in order to improve your performance and increase customer satisfaction.
• Social media advertising is an effective channel for market campaigns too. The best thing about it is that the cost and the ROI are directly proportional. The more you spend on advertising on social media, the higher is your ROI. The Return on Investment is measured as the amount a business receives in return for the time, money and resources it spends on social media marketing. It is important to consider this for a business as it helps understand if the marketing efforts are headed in the right direction. This also gives an opportunity to constantly update the business’s efforts based on the results from your consumers.

Social media offers several features and opportunities to get your business visibility. Some of these include:

• Live Streams
  A study conducted by Brandlive noted that about 95% of marketers were planning to add live videos to their social media marketing strategies. There’s a lot of things you can do through live videos such as launching new products. You can even demonstrate your products and create how-to live videos. This can help your audience get acquainted with the product better too. Sephora frequently does Q&A live videos on Facebook to generate engagement and resolve their customers’ queries.
• Influencer Marketing
  Influencer marketing has become popular on social media very quickly. It has even beaten print marketing in terms of popularity on Google Trends. People with thousands of followers can leverage their audiences and collaborate with brands.

While it cannot completely replace traditional marketing, social media marketing is here to stay and grow. With the rise in popularity of AI-powered chatbots, augmented reality, and social commerce, many marketers are using social media as an effective marketing and sales generation tool, and you should do the same.
However, it is important to understand and leverage the new features of different social networks to stay relevant to the ever-evolving industry of social media marketing.