Social media marketing can serve many purposes for your business, and for you professionally. Sites like Facebook and Twitter attract hundreds of millions, or even billions of users, and you only need to reach a tiny fraction of these people to be able to consider social media campaign a success. As well as using these sites to prospect for leads, there are other ways that you can consider using your social profile in a bid to try and improve your business and website results.

1 – Competitor Research

Competitor research is an invaluable business tool. It enables you to keep on top of the competition, see who is outperforming you, and to determine exactly what they are doing that is proving so successful. You can use this research to help drive your own efforts.

Use the search facility provided on each of the networks, and look for your main competitors. Follow them, like them, and friend them. Watch the content they post, and determine which submissions perform best for them. What type of content is generating the most shares? Which do you like best?

You can use the information gather to emulate their success, but steer clear of simply copying exactly what they do.

2 – Customer Communication

Staying in touch with your customers can enable you to make multiple sales without having to market your business time and time again. If you treat your social media followers like segmented prospects, you will find that social sites are a great way to communicate.

Encourage your customers to follow you on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other network. Ask questions, encourage conversation, and be prepared to answer any communication that is sent to you by your clients. This increases engagement while reminding your customers why they used you in the first place.

3 – Content Marketing

Content marketing means creating high quality content, and then marketing it to potential customers. While most content marketing will concentrate on the content that you have on your site, there is nothing to stop you from marketing the content you post and share on social networks.

Use the likes of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter’s Vine, to help you post a wider range of content types. Whatever you post on one site, promote it using your other social profiles. Set up boards on Pinterest and channels on YouTube if you are serious about your content marketing. 

4 – Build Your Authority

Authority not only helps you to enjoy more conversions for your content, but it is also used as measure of your site’s quality by the likes of Google and other search engines. It is vital, therefore, that you have the appearance of an authoritative website owner.

Use Google Author markup, only share high quality content, and get involved in your local community. Authority is typically measured by the level of engagement that your content attracts, so the more shares and likes you receive per post, the more authoritative you will appear and the better your results will be.

5 – Market To Mobile Users

Facebook endured difficult times following its flotation on the stock market. However, it has seemingly found its place with mobile marketing. Twitter, on the other hand, is extremely popular as a mobile social network, largely due to its short form posts.

You can use these facts to your advantage by marketing your business to mobile users on these and other sites. Reaching a mobile audience can prove difficult through SEO and other traditional digital marketing techniques, but using the might of existing platforms with billions of users between them, can make the process a lot simpler and more efficient.