Social Media and your marketing efforts

Why is social media essential to your marketing efforts? Social media creates an avenue for businesses to engage in conversation. The people that are going to follow you want to know about your products and services, but don’t want to necessarily be the other end of a sales pitch. It opens doors for business professionals to educate clients and prospects through valuable content. The content you provide for this new community of people should be appealing enough to retweet or repost. Webinars, cases studies, live demos, articles, press release, events, giveaways, blog posts and white papers are all valuable content to be shared.
Embracing your company identity
Social media gives you the ability to share your story and your brand. You have an incredible opportunity to let the world know what sets you apart from your competitors. You don’t necessarily do this by shouting out who you are plain and simply. You do it by embracing your company’s personality and by sharing value-driven information to the people following you. If you are able to listen to your greater audience and engage with them in a way that is true to your company you will no doubt build lasting business relationships that will positively affect your business as a whole.
Ability to respond to negative feedback quickly
By paying attention to what people are saying about your industry or more specifically about your products/services you will be able to respond quickly to negative feedback. If someone is sharing something negative about your company, it is in your best interest to follow up with them immediately. Act gracefully and figure out how you can help them in the most appropriate way.
Driving traffic to your site
As I mentioned previously social media is a great way to promote news and drive people to your site. Facebook has an application for you to post events to. You can easily fit a product launch announcement or event invite in 140 characters or less. You can start a discussion about the upcoming tradeshow you are part of in Linkedin. And you can highlight the benefits of your event or new product through a blog post. These are all great places to share other content your company has created as well, such as whitepapers, case studies, demos, support resources.
In short, social media is your ultimate resource to share, engage and build relationships.