Do You Have a Social Media Marketing Strategy?
“Social media marketing” is all the rage right now. The Internet’s buzzing with blog posts on the importance of a social marketing for online businesses.
Let me ask you: If you don’t yet have a social media strategy for your health supplements business, why don’t you?
Many of your competitors do. And they’re discovering that social media marketing is the new way to conduct business successfully. Social marketing is the new wave of the future, and it’s here now.
Two of the main social media sites on the Internet are Facebook and Twitter. Let’s look at some of the statistics of these websites to see how vast their reach is.
Why Facebook Marketing Is a Must
for Your Social Media strategy
- over 750 million people used Facebook by September 2011
- 50% of active Facebook users log on each day
- the average Facebook user has 130 “friends”
- the average user spends more than 11 hours per month on Facebook
- Facebook users share over 30 billion (30 thousand million) pieces of content every month (links, news, posts, photos, etc.)
- the average user creates 90 pieces of content every month
- around 70% of users are outside the United States
- the United Kingdom had over 29 million users by May 2011
- the United States had over 155 million users by May 2011
- over 150 million users access Facebook on mobile devices
No wonder Facebook marketing is such a sought-after skill in 2012!
Now let’s look at some Twitter statistics.
Find Out How to Get Followers on Twitter
and Your Business Could Boom
- a billion (1,000 million) tweets (Twitter posts) are made each week
- on March 12, 2011, 572,000 new Twitter accounts were opened
- during February 2011, 460,000 new accounts per day were opened
- in March 2010, the average tweets per day were 50 million
- in February 2011, the average tweets per day were 140 million (a 280% increase since the previous March)
- in January 2010 an estimated 14.28 million users accessed Twitter on their mobile devices
- in January 2011 an estimated 26 million users accessed Twitter on their mobile devices (a 182% increase since the previous January)
- in January 2008 Twitter had 8 employees
- in March 2011 Twitter had 400 employees, a 5,000% increase since January 2008
Keyword research shows that on average the key phrase “how to get followers on twitter” is typed into the search engine search boxes 2,400 times each month. Savvy marketers know the power of Twitter and constantly try to find new ways to exploit its use.
So how does all this impact your online health supplements business?
Simply put: if you don’t have a social media strategy in place (or don’t know how social marketing works), your online business is probably losing a ton of sales.
5 Reasons Why Social Media Marketing Matters
1. Brings Traffic to Your Website
Many websites, even if their website optimization is done right, are invisible on the Internet – few people even know those websites exist.
It’s like having a store in the middle of a vast prairie. Your store could be beautifully designed and look wonderful, but if only one person passes by every few months, you’ll make hardly any sales.
But if someone tweets about your organic acai berry powder to 1,000 followers, and 200 of those followers then retweet to 1,000 of their followers, over 200,000 eyes will see your website! Imagine how a proper social media marketing plan could transform your bottom line!
SEO copywriting helps to bring more traffic to your website over time. But effective social marketing boosts your traffic flow fast.
2. A Low-Cost Way to Get Clicks
Pay per click (PPC) advertising is now very expensive.
If, for example, you want to use the key phrase “cocoa health benefits” in a Google PPC ad, you may have to pay $18.60 each time a person clicks on that ad. So 100 clicks will cost you $1,860!
And what if only one of those clickers buys your product?
But if you simply write a blog post on “cocoa health benefits” and then tweet that to your followers, and hundreds of them retweet to their followers, you could get a flood of traffic that costs you nothing (just the time it takes you to write your blog post).
3. A Low-Cost Way to Increase the Backlinks to Your Web Pages
To rank near the top of the search engine listings, web pages need lots of quality links coming in from other websites.
It’s tough to get good quality backlinks. But if people paste your web page addresses on their Facebook pages or in their tweets and then in their blog posts as well this helps to grow the number of links to your website.
Social marketing done effectively helps to turn your website into an authority site over time.
4. Helps to Keep Your Business at the Top of People’s Minds
The days of succeeding in business with a static website are over. A “static” website is one where the content never changes. Stale content gives visitors no incentive to return to your website.
You must update your content, using the keywords people search with, to constantly reach a new audience and entice old visitors to come back.
Blogging, Facebook posts and using the 140-character “microblogging” format of Twitter tweets are an ideal way to get visitors to see your web content.
Each time you write a captivating blog post, post on your Facebook fan page or make an interesting tweet you get people to sit up and take notice. This helps to keep your brand and message at the forefront of people’s minds.
5. Builds a Relationship With Your Potential Customers
Post something interesting on your Facebook fan page and you’ll probably get a lot of comments in response.
These comments give you an insight into the minds of your potential customers. You then respond with follow-up posts or comments that address questions these people are asking. This quickly positions you as an expert and shows you’re someone who cares about the needs of your visitors.
Also by responding quickly to a query or comment, you’re seen to be someone who’s available. Your Facebook page is an active hub and people will congregate around it to draw useful information from your posts. Plus they’ll make comments that add value to your existing post content.
