Successful Social Media Marketing for Business

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Using social media as part of your overall advertising strategy is a smart investment of your time and budget.  However, using social media well is not an accident.  It is the result of a well-planned strategy to reach various audiences in the most effective way possible.  A good social media campaign acknowledges the realities of marketing in a social world and uses these facts to structure activities that will bring the highest return on investment for every advertising dollar and minute spent.

As this infographicshows, there is a recipe for using social media successfully as part of a marketing campaign. According to the information presented in this visual:

• Facebook accounts for 92 percent of social media marketing
• Twitter accounts for 84 percent
• LinkedIn accounts for 71 percent
• RSS feed accounts for 68 percent

For Fortune 500 companies:

• 23 percent have a blog
• 58 percent are on Facebook
• 62 percent are on Twitter

About 43 percent of marketers say that they have noticed an improvement in sales related to a social media marketing campaign, and 47 percent are likely to buy from a company they follow on social media.

A good social media campaign incorporates a variety of strategies, but they all hinge on one thing:  understanding your audience.  It is critical to understand the groups you are trying to reach in order to use the right social media to gain their attention.

For example, in the case of Fortune 500 companies, a further analysis of their social media use shows that Twitter is the social media of choice for a reason.  Fortune 500 company executives rarely have time to blog, but they can tweet easily or have someone else set up their tweets for them.  However, the major reason for favorite Twitter is the type of platform this method represents.  Twitter is designed for “micro-blogging”; in fact, there is a character limit per tweet, so most people simply tweet short messages or links to sites with more information.  This fits perfectly with most Fortune 500 companies’ goals:  to reach a large audience quickly and engage them so that they pursue further information about news items or interesting facts.