Saturday, June 27, 2009

The Top 20 Business Reasons To Use Social Media Marketing

I just finished reading The Top 20 Business Reasons To Use Social Media Marketing by David Carelton. This article does indeed list 20 reasons for businesses to use social media marketing and all of them are great reasons. So great that I am listing them out here:

The Top 20 Business Reasons to Use Social Media Marketing

Improve customer and prospect relationships

Conduct inexpensive yet effective market research

Build brand awareness, authority and credibility

Drive traffic to your website

Ability to obtain insight into targeted niche markets

Find new distribution channels

Improve search engine rankings through link building

Find and research targeted decision makers, prospects, customers and contacts

Monitor reputation - what are people saying about you or your company

Attain expert status for you, your company or your brand

An effective form of communicating with past, present and future clients

Share information used to educate prospects

Spy on your competition

Provides increased visibility for you, your products or your brand

Generate more leads

Get more referrals

Find joint venture partners

A new vehicle to post PR, events and articles

Provide better customer service

And of course - INCREASE SALES!

More importantly however, this article stresses a very vital component to using social media successfully and that component is simply that the skill set used in traditional marketing is not the same skill set used in social media marketing. In order to succeed in today's market place PRs and marketers are going to have to constantly strive to stay on top on the many new tools available to them AND learn how each of these tools can be used to obtain the products that they used to obtain through traditional channels.