Social media marketing is an integral part of any marketing and branding strategy. This means every check-in, tweet, mention, reply, like and/or comment are not just goals. These social signals are a means to get your brand to a higher level. Social media marketing is not just a way to boost sales. It has multiple advantages. Let’s look at them.

Enhanced Brand Visibility and Recognition

Social media marketing is one of the most effective methods to build your brand visibility. A multi-platform presence targetted towards the right target audience can leverage your brand to newer heights. You also become more approachable for your customers.

Improved Brand Loyalty & Credibility

Being there for your audience or target market makes your brand more credible. Engaging with them socially instils a feeling of confidence in your customers. This, in turn, makes them loyal to you and your business. Loyal customers mean better brand ambassadors.

More Traffic to Your Website

Content that you share from your social channels has a great potential to direct more traffic to your website. The idea is to create curated and relevant content that is shared regularly on appropriate social channels. Good quality content is usually noticed and becomes a great customer acquisition tool similar to a good customer retention tool. Eyeballs on your content will create multiple gateways directing more traffic to your website.

Better Search Engine Rankings

Social signals are the new buzzword in the search engine optimization arena. Social signals are likes, shares, comments, tweets and mentions on social platforms. You can leverage on these by generating quality content on your website and blogs that people can interact with. Search engines like google give weight to such social signals thereby pushing up website rankings.

Higher Conversion Rates

Social mentions on multiple platforms create a magnetic pull of traffic to your blog or website. This creates an opportunity to convert a lead into a sale. Interaction with your followers on social media humanize your brand. Hence, a brand is treated like a person. This makes it easier to do business since people like to do business with people and not companies. This also creates stickiness with your followers and leads to your content going viral.

Better Return on Investment (RoI)

Social media presence is available to everyone for free on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest. Even paid social promotions on these platforms are cheaper than other traditional media. An investment in paid promotions on social channels hence give a better return on investment.  You can always start with a small budget and tweak it after your goals find success.

Stronger Customer Relationships

A humanized brand is responsive and engaging. Social platforms allow humanized brands to build their network and communicate effectively with their customers. This builds stronger customer relationships since customer know that their comments will receive an appropriate personalized response than canned answers.

Easy Content Distribution

Effective social media engagement needs a sound content strategy. If you have great content a marketing distribution plan needs to be devised. Today, the challenge for a business to reach out to their audience is simplified with the help of social media. What a business needs to do is to tailor the right content for the right audience via the right social media platform.

Better Customer Insights

By gathering information from social platforms you are able to understand your customers better. Insights like what people think about your brand and how do they react to it are valuable and help you in fine-tuning your products and services. These insights also go a long way in establishing a loyal customer base and generate repeat sales.

Influencer Status

Well crafted content that you share with your followers on social media establishes your expertise in that area. Good quality content elevates your authority and gains you more followers. However, take it to the next level. Engage & communicate with your followers and address their queries or concerns. This will catapult you to the influencer status and better place your brand.

Social media marketing is more than just a hype today. It is an essential tool that allows brands and all businesses big and small to engage and communicate with their target audience and customers. The advantages of integrating social media marketing are huge and involving. It is critical to build your social media marketing into your overall marketing plan.

So how is this done? I’ll try to keep it simple with our 5 point practice at Interactive World.

1. Quality “content” is the key: Take this article for example. The purpose of this article is to provide concise information to visitors on how white hat SEO needs to be done. This means your content has to be qualitative, factual and relevant. “Is there a pertinent message that I am offering?” is the question you need to ask before hitting publish.
2. User experience – Put yourself into the user/ audience’s shoes. Create content that allows them to take away learning as compared to gibberish that a lot of online content contains today. A great user experience will lead to a lot of buzz for you in cyberspace.
3. Engagement – Is the content engaging for your audience? Does it add value by way of information? Does it stimulate thinking and drive an interaction? Will it elicit “social signals” from the readers of your article? Sharing it in social media is an easy way to find out. If people share your content, they have found it to be interesting, concise and engaging. Such social media marketing provides a signal to SEs about popularity of content thereby marking it upwards.
4. Go technical – Ensure that the page titles and relevant meta content is used appropriately in the webpage. The navigation structure is clearly laid out for a great user experience. XML sitemaps are present and working. Sitemaps ping SEs when you publish fresh content and provide crawlers with a map of links to crawl and index.
5. Check your servers – Poorly maintained servers with inadequate bandwidth make your websites sluggish. Google has indicated that sites with long loading times would be penalized. Load time is a factor today since a sluggish website will also make your visitors turn away.

In a nutshell, do not build websites or content targeted towards search engines. Practice white hat SEO to focus on the user of a website to succeed. These practices are legit and work for your benefit in the long run. Black hat on the other hand may give you a short term advantage but it won’t last long.

Here is a list of “Don’ts” regarding Black Hat SEO in 2016 that you need to keep in check, if you are aggressive on SEO for your website.

1. Don’t use guest bloggers to solicit business reviews especially to get that all important inbound link. Genuine blogs farewell for any business but the reverse can be quite damaging.
2. Buying or selling links – Both of these tactics don’t work and are considered to be a link scam by Google.
3. Keyword Stuffing – Keywords in meta content may have lost their sheen but some SEO agencies stuff image “Alt” tags with keywords. You got it. This is highly annoying to your visually-impaired visitors and also amounts to keyword spamming. Use alt tags for what the image means than stuffing. This goes for stuffing meta description as well.
4. Link exchange is passé – Search Engines like Google respect editorial endorsements from natural mentions or “social signals”, but link exchange has lost its meat. You’ll simply waste your time doing this in 2016.
5. Article Spinning – So you have an original article written and have paid for it. Fair enough. To have it published on your blog and optimise it for the quality content it is works very well. However, if you spin same article (manually or automated) on every second website you can, you’ll get penalized for duplicate content. This goes for rewritten articles with changed titles as well. The damage will be more than the benefit. So be careful.
6. Abuse of Rich Snippets – Rich snippets are a very powerful tool to garner clicks on a search engine results page. Irrelevant rich snippets can result in a spammy structured markup penalty. When using rich snippets, ensure you choose one that matches the content of your page. For example, you shouldn’t use a recipe snippet if your page doesn’t actually have recipes).
7. Hidden Text – A very old but frequently used technique. This involves keyword rich text hidden by the same colour as the background of the page to deceive the SEs. This works negative on the keyword density and is easily recognised by search engines. Avoid.
8. Comment spamming: Comment spamming uses software to post links in comment sections of selected blogs. This can surely generate a large number of backlinks to your website in a short amount of time, potentially increasing your rankings. However, Google is great at identifying and devaluing these types of links.

There is much more to Black Hat SEO in 2016. However, if you monitor your SEO staff or agency for these tactics, be sure to steer clear. The benefits accrued from such deceptive maneuvers will be temporary, however, the penalties will be long lasting. White hat SEO works better.

Focus on generating good quality content  that engages and generates “social signals” rather than using tactics that can be detrimental for your business.