Businesses depend on the use of social media channels to build links, enhance main website performance and keep their audience engaged. The new trends consist of specialized strategies for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin, Google+ marketing, although ROI for social media optimization (SMO) remains elusive. 

With social media outlets, companies build brand awareness and generate publicity for their products and services. The purpose of most marketing campaigns targeting social platforms is to generate more traffic for the main website and sales, on the long run.

Relevance for search engine indexation

Marketing campaigns conducted on social media as part of SMO efforts do not remain outside the scope of search engines. Quite the contrary!

• Search engines utilize users’ recommendations on social networks like Google+, Twitter and Facebook to evaluate and rank pages.
• When a page is liked or shared by a user, the SE interprets it as a vote for the quality of the web page.
• Websites that have more likes will occupy a more favorable (i.e. visible) position in search engine result pages.

Viral web promotion

We have all seen photos, videos, comments or news going viral around the web. Effective Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin, Google+ marketing strategies can harness the power of viral marketing and channel it for business goals. It suffices to say that 80% of the activity on Pinterest results from ‘repinning’.

Social Bookmarking – the use of several social networks in parallel enables businesses to maintain their existing audience while attracting new followers too. For instance, a lot of traffic can be generated from social bookmarking. The system enables users to save links to certain pages and share them.

Targeting the blogosphere further increases clients’ or followers’ engagement. Content is shared by means of RSS both in special blog search engines and in the blogosphere.

Although social media marketing has grown in lots of directions, clearly measuring ROI of social bookmarking and other SMO campaigns remains a daunting task. Specialists clearly encourage the careful definition of goals for every campaign in order to be able to use metrics to track performance and monitor ROI.

Further business applications for social media

Brand building and product/service promotion do not represent the only goals of social media marketing. Companies now use social networks for lots of other purposes:

• Employee engagement – companies want their employees to be enthusiastic about their work and make efforts for the best interest of the company.
• Public relations and customer satisfaction – to keep in contact with customers, manage feedback and limit the consequences of negative reviews;
• Recruiting – a growing number of companies use social recruiting applications to select or screen job applicants. LinkedIn serves great for HR purposes, although it’s just one among many other resources.

All in all, social media channels have pushed the limits of communication and business interaction to a whole new level, forcing business owners to rethink their strategies and come up with new marketing tactics that can deal with the new web trends. Even if ROI is still difficult to determine for social media marketing campaigns, companies continue to invest time, effort and loads of money in this direction for development.