Today in marketing, one thing is undeniable: social media is in. That’s why for beginners, it pays to learn about the long and short routes of using social media. Better yet, answer the question: How to use social media and get great results?

Social media, like SEO, is one of the hottest marketing trends today. Amazingly so that in less than a decade, it already landed a unique position as the marketing tactic of choice among many businesses.

But before we give off with the tips on becoming the next social media rock star, we’ll first settle some issues of concern among marketers – effectiveness of social media in driving results or return on investments.

To be or not to be in social media

For marketers, one question remains: is it the best time now to dive in and embrace social media?

Let’s consider some facts. In a study conducted by the Content Marketing Institute, it showed that 87% of business-to-business now run their marketing programs via social networking sites.

Then if this is any indication, believing that social media is popular is nothing short of logical. This was also the same basis for recent claims that social media has become “the most popular marketing tactic” in recent years.

This is not merely an exaggeration after all. By just looking around, it’s not difficult to see why.

The impact and sweep of social media across the world of marketing and branding from every board meetings, books, blogs to Twitter conversations are overwhelming.

According to the Social Media Examiner, there are 58% of marketers using social media for the past three years have reported sales improvement. The same report showed that 65% of B2B marketers have earned a customer through Linkedin.

Moreover, folks at CMI, who surveyed marketers about the effectiveness of social media for marketing, further revealed that only 49% of marketers believe social media is effective.

The CMI, in effect, represents an important reality: social media tend to be the least effective means to use as a marketing tactic.

While popular, the effectiveness of social media remains, by and large, something to be proven. But the most important insight above all these is that social media may probably be poised to change the marketing landscape anytime in the future.

Factors to Consider to Leverage Social Media

To better understand and leverage social media’s use in marketing, let’s look over some factors to consider when viewing its effectiveness, ROI-wise.

Know the buying behavior of your target audience

Buyer preferences, behaviors, and problems they want solved are just a few things you need to understand about your customers.

Having a clear grasp of buyer persona would help you arrive at the best solution to meet your customers’ needs and interests. To better get a pragmatic take on trends, use research.

Include social media in your end-to-end marketing campaign

Plan carefully and then decide whether your brand communication campaigns will do better if you have social media incorporated within your end-to-end marketing campaign.

Buyer understanding must be matched with a grasp of your customers’ buying cycles. Your understanding of your customers’ journey through your brand will give you an idea whether or not it’s time to leverage social media. The latter part will show you whether it’s ROI-wise to consider bringing social media to the fore.

Have a goal, make efforts to reach it

Like anything before you start something, it is essential that you have your own set of goals and objectives when planning your social media projects. A clear mission statement can be useful when setting a benchmark to measure your progress.

Offer Quality Content

Content that is engaging and relevant to your audience are proven and effective when it comes to driving sales leads. In itself, social media will not drive ROI. Hence, it is vital to develop a sound content marketing strategy.

To create a truly effective content strategy, create content that will interest your buyers and engage them to progress to the next stage of the buying process: checkout. Raise awareness as well about your brand’s trustworthiness over your rivals.

Use Metrics

Develop benchmarks that you can use in measuring the effectiveness and success of your sales ROI goals. It is not optional to measure results but must be obligatory. In this regard, you might choose a tool that offers social media analytics features.

With the right tool to provide you with metrics that you need most, you can get the real numbers of the leads generated through to sales closed. The end benefit is letting you see how effective social media has delivered for your venture.

Final thoughts

As consumers’ reluctance to use social media are beginning to wane and regard the platform’s power in performing job search and even shopping, businesses, meanwhile should take notice.

With carefully crafted strategies and posting of quality posts over Facebook and Twitter, businesses can incredibly increase the benefits offered by their mindful use of social media use.

From getting huge savings for promoting and advertising their business versus advertising in radio or television they can let social media deliver profits and return on investment.

Social media is here to stay and the best that your business can do is to enjoy it while it’s offering the best that your company can get out it. Enjoying does not necessary mean merely posting arbitrary posts or tweets, or posting only whenever you feel like it. If that’s your idea of fun, then you’re definitely waiting for negative ROI to emerge and hurt your bottom line.

Remember, as a new field in marketing, social media is not yet mature, hence, there aren’t really some hard-and-fast rules.

And perhaps one rule to stick by is to always ask this one important question: is social media offering my business the benefits or return on investments while saving on cost? If the answer is yes, well, you definitely must give it a go!