Social media platforms which include Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube. These platforms provide digital spaces where individuals, businesses, and organizations can create profiles, share content, connect with people, and engage in various forms of communication.
Social Media Marketing is a powerful digital marketing medium for small businesses to increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, engage with the audience, and generate leads and sales. It can be also used particularly for customer support and user feedback. Here you can learn more Importance of social media marketing in business success
In this post, I am writing about the importance of social media marketing keeping in view the changes in digital marketing platforms such as search engines, SEO, and the increasing integration of artificial intelligence such as open AI ChatGPT in search engines.
And especially in 2024 and 2025, your business should not be negatively affected by these changes, keeping all these in mind, I am expressing importance, suggestions, and doubts.
So, let us get started with the basics to understand the importance of social media marketing for your business.
1. Publish interactive and engaging visual content
Social Media platforms provide options for small business owners to upload highly visual content such as short/long videos, infographics, presentations, and many other types of digital content.
With this type of content, small business owners can attract and engage with their audience.
This is very beneficial for small businesses to showcase products and tell the story more effectively. Even social media users expect or are more inclined towards engaging and attractive content. The use of social media is routine work for most of the current and next-generation customers.
Overall, the use of multimedia content on social media platforms helps small business owners increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, broadcast product launching, and generate leads and sales. That is why social media marketing and the use of social media in the current scenario is very useful. Learn more: Top 10 Productive Uses of Social Media in our daily life
How you can take advantage of social media for your business growth using Visual Content?
Users are already scrolling, liking, and moving on social media platforms. Now once they see your marketing content or ads, they behave the same, like they are already doing. If it is not engaging, they scroll to watch next. You will get no impression and engagement.
Visual content communicates faster in users’ minds and if it is engaging, they act. Whether you are generating just page likes, generating leads, taking user feedback, or understanding user behaviors. You will get likes, shares, and clicks.
But for this, you must create highly engaging and stunning visual content. You can use this visual content through paid social media ads for quick results or just keep growing your business influence organically on social media.
When you explore and learn about visual content creation or digital content creation you will understand a wide variety of options to tell the story behind your business or for promotions such as images, videos, GIFs, infographics, and presentations.
With the help of the right digital or visual content creation tools, you will get a wide variety of templates to create stunning and highly engaging visual content.
There are various types of visual content creation tools, you can consider as per your business needs, type of content, and budget. Even you create visual content in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.
However, using the pro version of any visual content creation tool that is specialized and equipped with modern features such as interactive UI and UX, drag-and-drop options, stock-free images, videos, and hundreds of templates allows one to create any type of popular content.
Following are some of the best tools to create social media content:
- Visme: With the use of Visme you can create Presentations, Infographics, Design & Video Effortlessly.
- invideo: InVideo is an intuitive online video editing platform that enables users to easily create and customize videos using pre-designed templates and user-friendly tools.
- InShot: If you’re focusing on video content, InShot is a mobile app that lets you edit videos for social media, adding effects, music, and text.
- Animoto: Another great tool for creating videos, Animoto lets you easily make professional-looking videos with photos, video clips, and text.
Once the content creation part is done you can start your social media marketing campaign and see the magic.
Other than this you can also use this visual content on your website or blog that also beneficial in terms of user experience and people-first content approach.
2. Option to Target specific audience and group of people
When you see ads on social media that are related to you, your business, your search, your interest, your likes/shares, and your overall behaviors, it means that you or a group of people like you are specifically targeted by that advertiser and businesses.
For example, what do you do when you see an ad that is highly relevant to you as per your interests, needs, and desires? Mostly you click on or get engaged with this. Even if you do not plan that right now, you will still like that. And if you recently purchased that, then you will share that ad with your friends or network as well.
How does audience targeting work on social media?
The ads and content you see on social media are only seen by you or a group of people like you. It is because the ads and content are targeted specifically based on your age, gender, location, interests, hobbies, likes/dislikes, shares, web browser history (cookies), behaviors, and many others.
This type of detail allows advertisers and businesses to reach the exact group of people who are most likely to be interested in their products and services.
Now you can think and analyse on your own how beneficial this precise targeting option can be for your business.
This is also helpful for users because they get content that is aligned with their interests, needs, and desires at the present time and increases their social media browsing experience. That is why social media marketing is almost essential for small business owners to get more in less time and within budget.
Related: How to determine your target audience by following these steps
3. Go Viral
Social media platforms include user-generated content, the ability to interact through likes, comments, and shares, and the potential for content to go viral and reach a wide audience.
Everything is created by users for users. Any type of content such as an image, video, blog post, or link can spread quickly and become viral across various social media channels.
For example a video on YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok. Images on Pinterest, blog posts on LinkedIn, and short messages on X (Twitter) etc. When content goes viral it gains attention and engagement from large numbers of users within a shorter time period.
If it’s business content then popularity leads to a rapid increase in the visibility of the brand, product, and messages associated with that content.
How does this work?
While the content can go viral organically on social media. But to create a buzz in the beginning you can also promote and potentially make content go viral through social media ads. But the things to consider is that the viral content formula involves creating highly shareable and engaging content that resonates with a broad audience and interest.
Successful viral content typically triggers an emotional response, tells a compelling story, and leverages the power of social media #trends #tags and #events.
But also remember that even bad and useless content can become viral. But also, in that if the level of cheapness and nonsense is on top.
4. Creation of an online community and interaction
With the use of social media platforms, you can create an online community around your brand. The activities involved in community building are those things that make followers feel connected, valued, and eager to interact with both your content and other community members.
This can be achieved through activities like responding to comments, inviting discussions, running polls, sharing your targeted user-created content, following trends and events, posting regularly, and facilitating conversations that encourage users to share their thoughts, experiences, and opinions.
5. Relationship building
Social media supports the cultivation of long-term relationships that extend beyond immediate conversions, fostering trust and loyalty. Social media users are people with emotions, interests, and desires not just users. If you try to spam then that can decrease the reputation of your brand.
For example, if you’re promoting the content or products on Pinterest and trying to generate sales or website visits only publish 2 to 3 posts or pins each day. And not just your content but also pins or others’ pins as well.
By consistently engaging with your audience, providing valuable content, and encouraging interactions, you establish a genuine connection that leads to ongoing engagement, repeat business, and a positive brand reputation.
6. Social Media Marketing is Essential Now than SEO
Social media is now essential for small businesses, especially with the growth of Artificial Intelligence and integration of AI by major search engines such as Google and Microsoft Bing.
While SEO has its benefits, it’s important to be aware of the challenges and think about a well-rounded marketing strategy that includes social media as well.
The future of SEO and free organic traffic is unpredictable. Getting free traffic organically from Google and Bing will become 10 times more difficult than ever.
AI is scraping or copying the content from the web, blogs, eBooks, and almost every written material on the web.
But if you deeply notice and observe how search engine work today then you might notice that Google and Bing is now trying to display everything to users on their page through AI.
Whether you search for major products, services, how-to guides, and educational material. The content is displayed to users through Generative AI tools on the same page where they searched.
And competing through this is not going to be easy for small business owners in the future to get free traffic or go viral through SEO. Also, the tools like ChatGPT also turn search engine users to their platforms. Even successful in that. Many small business owners, bloggers, and website owners soon see a decrease in their traffic.
That is why it’s more important to focus on social media for free website traffic, and marketing instead of fully relying on SEO. Start building your brand and utilizing all social media platforms whether it’s Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
How you can start using social media to promote your business?
Your brand presence should extend across multiple platforms, but avoid overwhelming them with excessive promotional links. Instead, focus on establishing trust and actively engaging with your audience. Transitioning from SEO to social media marketing, or shifting from organic to social media traffic, might be challenging initially.
However active engagement and trust-building on multiple platforms lead to greater benefits from social media than search engines, evident in examples of bloggers, YouTubers, and small businesses attracting over 10,000 daily visitors via social media channels.
If you focus on effective content creation, relatable storytelling, compelling visuals, and regular posting to maintain audience interest and interaction, you will be able to get the job done successfully.
It might be challenging in the beginning, but, after mastering the basics, you can reap greater benefits from social media than from search engines.
So, utilizing social media for marketing is crucial, particularly in the wake of tools like ChatGPT and shifts in Google and Bing search engine strategy, algorithm, and results.
Utilize this period to enhance brand visibility, engagement, and customer loyalty on social media. Consider the long-term advantages of connecting with the right audience at the optimal moment on all major social media platforms. Begin cultivating one to two relationships daily. And create and publish great content that attracts people to engage with your brand on social media.