There are multiple reasons Social Media Marketing is important today. The exact answer to this question will depend on your business, your industry, your target audience, your geographic region, and what it is you’re marketing. Below are 4 of the top reasons why Social Media Marketing is important today.

1. The number of users on Social Media continues to grow
It’s been estimated by Hootsuite that 3.49 billion people worldwide were frequent social media users in 2019. Out of those 3.26 billion use social media on their mobile devices. The world’s population was estimated at around 7.7 billion, meaning over 50% of the world’s population is using social media now.

It’s a safe bet that at least a large portion of your target audience is on social media today, often times these are the more technologically sophisticated users in a region or in some parts of the world the more wealthy users. The portion of your audience that isn’t on social media is likely to still be reached by messaging shared by users on social media, especially if that messaging reaches a large percentage of your audience quickly.

2. Consumers are using Social Media to make purchase decisions
Another reason social media marketing is important for your business is because consumers are increasingly using it as part of their pre-purchase research. A business with an empty Instagram or a dead Facebook page or an uninspiring Pinterest is likely to lose out when consumers go to perform their research prior to making a purchase on those platforms. If your business is on a social media platform and lists it on the website, it needs to at the very least be active with quality content.

3. Social Media Marketing places you in control of your message and your audience
One trait of SMM that many business owners seem to neglect is that it largely places them in charge of their audience reach and in control of messaging. Yes, it is true that organic reach on Facebook is ridiculously hard to achieve and signs that YouTube, Instagram, and even Reddit will go that route too. However, when compared to the pre-internet days or even the early days of search engines, social media provides far more ability for businesses.

For example prior to the internet a local restaurant might run radio ads to promote their restaurant, the radio station would write and cut the ad for them, and charge a fee to run the ad for specified number of times. In this case the radio station controlled the audience by playing music or talk shows over their radio waves and profited by requiring payment to reach any of them.

When the internet came online one of our fist major innovations were search engines. While we started with multiple engines, Google rose to dominance in 1998 and largely crushed their competitors, controlling over 80% of worldwide searches. Web searches mimic human psychology behavior known as “information search”. This is the second part of the Consumer Decision Making Process following immediately after “Need Recognition”. The problem for businesses is that Google (and other engines) place web documents in a rank order, meaning if all consumers use a search engine to find information and your business is not #1, then it becomes difficult to gain the reach to your audience. Search Engines “solve” this reach problem by offering advertising on their engines, in essence, selling access to your target audience.

Social Media resolves the issues (to some extent) of both of these types of marketing by allowing a marketer or a business to build a following and then engage them with revenue generating messaging.

4. Social Media makes it easy for consumers to share information, content, and recommendations with each other
Another trait that makes social media important for businesses is that users can easily share content with other users on the same platform. For example on Facebook it has become commonplace for users to ‘tag’ another user in the comments of a post by typing their name, on Twitter users retweet content they like to their followers, and on Instagram users can share a post they like into their “Instagram Story” very easily.

This means that marketers can craft messaging and allow that messaging to easily flow through their target audience / society using those social media platforms.

Summary
Social Media is used by nearly half of the world’s population on a frequent basis, many of those consumers perform pre-purchase research on social media, it grants business owners and marketers easier access to an audience and control over messaging, and users can more easily share messaging from marketers across social media.

REFERENCES

https://thenextweb.com/contributors/2019/01/30/digital-trends-2019-every-single-stat-you-need-to-know-about-the-internet/
https://thenextweb.com/podium/2019/12/30/social-media-is-fast-becoming-your-customers-product-research-tool-so-look-beyond-google/