For businesses in the Pacific Northwest, it’s become an imperative to engage in social media strategizing for a successful marketing plan. With the advent of the online technological age, companies have been forced to rework their advertising to fall in line with the most current trends. Today, social media dominates a surprisingly large portion of those trends. Whether your business is located in bustling Seattle, opulent Bellevue, expanding Kirkland, beautiful Gig Harbor, or industrial Tacoma, it’s crucial to have a strategy in place to take advantage of social media’s potentially inexhaustible benefits.
What is a Social Media?
Social media has a number of functioning definitions which are constantly evolving and changing due to social media’s own evolutions and changes. For now, social media is a set of computer-mediated tools that give people the opportunity to create, share, or exchange ideas through written information, virtual communities, or pictures and videos. It often comes in the form of websites and applications. The successful platforms have come to have names so popular that grandchildren and grandparents alike are familiar with them.
Popular Platforms
Perhaps the most popular social media platforms today are found among the following listed: Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, and Facebook. If you don’t yet recognize some of these names, and you’re an owner or a worker in a local business like a Seattle start-up, you need to jump on the World Wide Web and do some exploring. Sites like Facebook offer mostly social networking services. LinkedIn follows these norms, but instead puts a professional spin on those services, making it more of a gathering place for business entrepreneurs and hopeful job applicants. Instagram and Pinterest, on the other hand, focus more on hobbies and personal arts and crafts.
Benefits
A company looking to make use of social media, like a local Tacoma business, has nothing to lose and everything to gain. Here is a brief list of just a few of social media’s benefits to smaller companies.
- Traffic Driving. Social media helps to drive traffic to your website. Because of the incredible competition for user attention, businesses want as much traffic on their sites as possible. This is where social media can come in.
- SEO Marketing. Similarly, social media engagement is the first frontier in implementing SEO marketing. Blogging and tweeting can bring your company quickly into the limelight.
- Company Branding. There are few better ways to get your company culture, name, and brand into the public attention than through expressing it with social media.
- Public Participation. Social media uniquely allows the public to actually interact with brands and get to know them on a more personal, and therefore more appealing, level.
- Increasing business. While exposure is an important marketing process, getting a return on your investment is the key to your success. Using social media can enhance the flow of business to your company.
Without the use of social media, your local Bellevue or Kirkland company may be completely invisible to the average Internet user, and may have less business than it potentially could. Conversely, with the proper use of social media, the average Internet user won’t be able to forget, or want to forget, that you and your services exist. Social media, when used consistently and given time, can cause an upsurge of growth in your company’s regular business. Having the proper tools at hand can make a world of a difference, and there are many companies with social media and SEO targeting talents focused on making that change for you.