Social media came into existence along with the world wide web (www). Social media is a platform where people of similar profile gather and share their thoughts and minds. As the internet evolved, smart marketers saw an opportunity in using these social media platforms to publish their message and encourage the users to interact and engage with them.

Prominent social media platforms like Facebook, twitter, instagram, Linked In etc have been very successful in using social media to their advantage and earn revenue out of allowing brands to post their messages and use these platforms for customer interaction and engagement.

So, why is social media so important for brands?  

This is because:

• Social media is the easiest and the fastest medium of information dissemination on the internet.
• Since the base of social media users is very large across the world, it presents a good opportunity for brands to build connect.
• Just like the conventional media like outdoor, which relied on eyeballs like their primary objective, social media fulfils that need, but with more precision and ease.
• Studies have showed that social media has the potential of making or breaking opinions on things. Brands can use this to their own advantage.

How does a beginner manage social media?

• Decide which platform to use: Social media has many channels and each channel has its own advantages and disadvantages. The foremost decision is the choice of media channel. E.g. Facebook is used more by people for sharing their personal life, Linked in is used more by professionals, Twitter is used by people to share their thoughts in brief, instagram is more about pictures etc. According to the leading Digital Marketing experts Become Digital Today, this is the first decision that needs to be given highest attention.
• Optimize your social media profile: Once the decision is made, your profile needs to be optimiszed accordingly. It does not matter if you are an individual or a brand, your profile has to be easy to search and should have the right ingredient to attract the type of audience you are looking for.
• Connect your website or blog: Brands need to connect their social media pages with their websites or blogs to get the best result. After all the objective of engagement is to improve visits to your own internet property and improve its performance.
• Ensure you have social media buttons on your website/blogs: The way, your social media pages should influence your website/blog traffic, the reverse is also true. Hence, ensure that you enable the website/blog traffic to flow seamlessly to your social media pages with the help of buttons placed on your website/blogs.
• Follow the influencer: For every niche, there is an influencer. As the word suggests, an influencer is an entity who has a lot of followers and can influence their behavior and opinion. Hence, by following an influencer yourself, you are following a large group you have an opportunity to get introduced to a large group of potential customers with similar profile making it easy for your to market to them.
• Upload interesting content: Social media is all about engagement. And engagement can only be achieved through interesting content. Make sure that you keep the interest alive by sharing content that is interesting and engaging. The content could be in any form – articles, pictures, videos, games etc.
• Post regularly, but don’t overdo it: Being active is an important aspect for success on social media. While brand should post regularly, overdoing it will harm the brand equally. Hence, brand need to be aware of the thin boundary that exists between low, right and high frequency.
• Be patient and honest: It takes time to build friends in real life. Same is the case on social media too. Followers are added over a period of time and after carefully nurturing them from time to time. any attempt to abruptly add followers may go against the set rules of the media operator and may actually result in suspension of the account. So be patient with results while you add the critical volume of followers to reach a threshold.

For individuals social media is quite easy to manages, but for brands it needs an expert advice. Social media experts like Become Digital Today have a history of having strong brands on social media and that too in multiple business categories and across channels. Hence, if you are a brand that wants to make its debut or wants to manage social media channels effectively, then you must get in touch with Become Digital Today for a detailed analysis and creation of a successful social media strategy.