On Monday it was a strange day for social media users globally.
At approximately 4 pm, Facebook statuses stopped, messages between friends and family came to a sudden halt, and the usual barrage of selfies and funny videos we’re used to seeing on our Instagram timelines ceased.
It was an odd six hours, with news outlets speculating various reasons why the social media giant and its respective subsidiaries had randomly stopped working.
There was some speculation surrounding the reason for the outage, with some wild theories and more credible hypotheses. Many news outlets believed the blackout was in response to a series of whistleblower allegations regarding the social media conglomerate’s practices which emerged the day prior.
Since being booted back up, Facebook has apologised for the outage and stated it was, in brief, a tech-related issue that caused the blackout.
Twitter appeared to be one of the last social-media titans still standing, hilariously seizing the opportunity by posting on their company account, “hello literally everyone” — anticipating we would inevitably flock to their site to find out what on earth was going on.
All jokes aside, the outage demonstrated how much we have come to rely on social media, for better or worse, and for us, it highlighted how invaluable a tool it is when it comes to marketing. It also shone a light on how vital all other marketing platforms are.
Here are a handful of reasons why social media is an excellent tool for marketing, followed by a brief list of some other marketing platforms we have and how a world without social media might look in the marketing world.
Generating leads
Social media allows marketers to engage with people by posting content, updates, multimedia and other helpful information that can grab the interest of potential customers and clients, who in turn may decide to buy your product or service.
Converse with the community
Tying into our last point comes the opportunity to chat with your audience. Through replying to comments and direct messages, you can discover more about what people want and how to tailor your services better to the needs of your audience.
Cost-effectiveness
The great thing about marketing over social media is that it’s cheap, even for small businesses with minimal budgets.
You can spend a few pounds on boosting a post, or, if you’re lucky enough to have a decent following, enough shares will still grow your business’s social media presence.
Website traffic
Your social media page is quite often what people will gravitate toward before they even consider looking for your company’s website. However, if you share content from your website on your socials, your audience will naturally want to click on it, thus redirecting them to your website.
Boost your SEO ranking
Social media is an excellent way to increase your SEO rankings. In what has become one of the most competitive marketing elements for businesses, companies with an established social media presence send out their brand’s signal to the likes of Google, bolstering the brand’s SEO significantly.
While the outage reminds us of the constant value in social media marketing, we can’t help but imagine a world without it and how businesses would efficiently market themselves.
Businesses would still have websites, email campaigns, SMS, business cards, posters, and other forms of digital media such as podcasts to boost their brand, so it’s safe to say that it wouldn’t be the end of the world, speaking strictly in the marketing sense.
That being said, social media is such a go-to in promoting so much of the above that it’s difficult to imagine how effectively businesses would advertise their products without it. For our generation, social media is often the first port of call for marketing and what connects all of our other platforms. In other words, how would we tie it all together?
For that reason, we should be thankful in so many ways that we have access to social media and grateful that we don’t live in a reality without it.
