What Does Social Media Marketing Do?

What does social media marketing do? What is social media's purpose in online marketing?If you build a home-based business in network marketing, affiliate marketing, or some other form of online marketing, then you spend some of your time on social media. So, what does social media marketing do for you?
There are so many social media platforms available to marketers. Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are the ones that I use the most. LinkedIn, Snapchat and Instagram are three more that are very popular. YouTube is great for videos and StumbleUpon is one of many social sharing services. They all have the same purpose as far as social media marketing goes. What does social media marketing do?

What Does Social Media Marketing Do?

Affective marketing means that your message is in front of your audience. Where ever your audience is, your message needs to be there. Back in the day newspapers, radio and TV were the best places to be. If your audience rode the subway or the bus, your message was on the trains and in the bus stations. If your audience drove to work then your message might be on a billboard along the highway.
Chances are that your audience is online now and they spend time on social media. So your message needs to be on social media too. Social media is a great place to get exposure for your brand and your message.

Social Media is Better Than Traditional Marketing

Traditional media poses some hurdles for very small businesses. Social media gets rid of those hurdles and is even better than those old media outlets for a few very important reasons.

1) Low Cost

As a marketer, you can get your message on social media for free. You may hire someone to create your content for you, images or a short video for example. The actual cost of posting your content on social media is free.

2) Flexibility

Social media lets you post as frequently or infrequently as you want to and you can change your message at any time. With traditional media you have to plan everything out well in advance and it costs both time and money to make any changes.
Social media lets you respond to changes in your business environment as they happen, whether it is news that affects your business or questions and comments from your customers. Traditional media has production schedules and costs that make that nearly impossible.

3) Massive Potential Audience

I cannot even begin to comprehend the cost and logistics involved in reaching a global audience through traditional media, like newspapers or TV. It would take a large ad agency to make all of the connections to even begin to put it all together, more likely several of them.
Social media is already global. All you have to do is post your message on Facebook or Twitter and it can potentially reach anyone in the entire world. It is as easy to reach a global audience on social media as it is to reach a local one.

There is One Thing I Don’t Understand

As an online marketer myself, of course I follow a lot of other online marketers. I see some of them do something that I don’t understand. Hopefully someone can leave me a comment at the end of this post and explain why.
Again, what does social media marketing do? It gets your message in front of your audience on the internet.
What I see some marketers do is limit the audience that can see their messages on social media.

Facebook

I use Facebook to share my message with my followers and hope that they will like and share my posts with their followers. Of course I’m not going ask someone to do something for me without doing the same for them. When I see something that I like posted by someone else, I will like and share it with my followers.
The challenge that I have is that some marketers post their message so that it is only visible and shareable with their friends. They make it so that I cannot share their message with my followers. I don’t understand why they do that.
When you share personal content then it makes sense to limit it to friends and family. I don’t share anything personal on Facebook at all. It’s way too public for my taste. But a marketing message that you want to reach as large an audience as possible should be set to public.

Twitter

Twitter is the other social media platform that I use the most, and I use it pretty much the same as I use Facebook. I post my content and share other people’s content with my followers.
There is a service called TrueTwit that allows Twitter users to screen their followers to make sure that they are real people. That doesn’t make sense for marketers who want to grow their following to spread their message. Who cares if your new follower is a robot or not?
TrueTwit just makes it hard for people to follow you. I know that when I come across someone who uses that service I just pass them by. I figure they aren’t so serious about wanting to spread their message.

Again, What Does Social Media Marketing Do?

Social media marketing makes it easy to share your business and message with a potentially global audience for free. To my thinking, it gives marketers everything that they have been looking for throughout history. It allows marketers to customize their message on the fly and interact directly with their audience.
It’s so easy and available that you have to be careful not to sabotage your efforts by limiting the number of people who can see your posts on Facebook and Twitter.
If you know why as a marketer you would want to limit your audience on social media, please explain it to me in a comment below, and please share my post (publicly) with your followers on Facebook and Twitter.

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