Should I Hire a Social Media Marketer?

Thinking about hiring a Social Media Marketer leads to a very big decision. Do you want to use your budgeting on a Social Media Marketing company or should you hire an amateur that can just post some posts a couple times a week and be done?

First, let’s cover why Social Media Marketing is so important, then we will get to the question at hand. Social Media Marketing is the #1 way to increase your sales. According to the Pew Research Center, the number of Social Media users continues to climb every year. In 2016, nearly 8-in-10 online Americans (79%) now use Facbeook. 28% use Instagram, 21% use Twitter, 25% use LinkedIn, and 26% use Pinterest.

Social media users continue to use a relatively diverse array of platforms. More than half of online adults (56%) use more than one of the five social media platforms measured in a survey.

Now that we covered why Social Media Marketing is so important, let’s cover some of the benefits. Social media is all about relationship building, and it will grow as your followers tell their friends, and their friends tell their friends, and so on. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll be able to start growing that audience.

The longer you wait, the more you have to lose. When done right, social media marketing can lead to more customers, more traffic, and more conversations.

1. Increased Brand Recognition
Every opportunity you have to syndicate your content and increase your visibility is valuable. Your social media networks are just new channels for your brand’s voice and content. This is important because it makes you more accessible, familiar and recognizable for customers. For example, a frequent Facebook user could hear about your company for the first time only have stumbling upon it in a newsfeed. Or, an otherwise apathetic customer might become better acquanted with your brand after seeing your presence on multiple networks.

2. More Opportunities to Convert
Every post you make on a social media platform is an opportunity for customers to convert. When you build a following, you’ll simultaneously have access to new customers, recent customers, and old customers, and you’ll be able to interact with all of them. Every blog post, image, video, or comment you share is a chance for someone to react, and every reaction could lead to a site visit, and eventually a conversation.

3. Higher Conversation Rates
Social media marketing results in higher conversion rates in a few distinct ways. Perhaps the most significant is the fact that businesses become more humanized by interacting in social media channels. It is important for companies to interact on social media because people like doing business with other people; not companies.

4. Higher Brand Authority
Interacting with your customers regularly is a show of good faith for other customers. When people go to compliment or brag about a product or service, they turn to social media. And when they post your brand name, new audience members will want to follow you for updates. The more people that are talking about you on social media, the more valuable and authoritative your brand will seem to new users. Not to mention, if you can interact with major influencers on Facebook or other social networks, your visible authority and reach will skyrocket.

5. Increased Inbound Traffic
Without social media, your inbound traffic is limited to people already familiar with your brand and individuals searching for keywords you currently rank for. Every social media profile you add is another path leading back to your site, and every piece of content you syndicate on those profiles is another opportunity for a new visitor.

6. Better Search Engine Rankings
SEO is the best way to capture relevant traffic from search engines, but the requirements for success are always changing. It’s no longer enough to regularly update your blog, ensure optimized title tags and meta descriptions, and distribute links pointing back to your site. Google and other search engines may be calculating their rankings using social media presence as a significant factor, because of the fact that strong brands almost always use social media. As such, being active on social media could act as a “brand signal” to search engines that your brand is legitimate, credible, and trustworthy. That means, if you want to rank for a given set of keywords, having a strong social media presence could be almost mandatory.

Now that we covered why social media marketing is so important and only a handful of the benefits, let’s focus on the question at hand. Should I hire a Social Media Marketer? Hiring someone who genuinely understands the social media world will end up paying off. It may seem like a lot of money you can’t justify to spend, but the whole point of hiring a Social Media Marketing Company is your return on investment. Your social media drives your online presence. A Social Media Marketing company understands it’s not just about building a community and relationships, but about using these social platforms to manage, measure, and analyze the success or failure of all your social media marketing initiatives.

As a client, don’t expect to see immediate results. The first step is getting on social media, but realize it will take time to build a community. Be prepared to devote at least 6 months on your social media strategy to see results. A Social Media Manager will know your audience needs to be engaged with your brand, so they will be prepared to give them quality/valuable content, tips and news they can use — all information that appeals to your targeted audience/customer base.

The key is to be consistent and to stick with your strategy plan. This is another good reason why you should hire a Social Media Marketer. Not only will they be experienced on how to push your traffic, but they will always stay on top of it for you. You may be too busy focusing on new ideas, services, products, and running your business to keep up with social media, which is another ideal reason to hire a social media marketing company. Their job is to post valuable content and interesting content and keep you in front of people on the social media platforms so you don’t have to. You will never have to fall behind on social media marketing as long as you have a social media marketer.