What’s the importance of social media marketing? Social media posts drive targeted traffic.

Whatever your industry, segment and audience, a substantial portion of your customers and leads are on social. A recent Pew Research Center study found that 68% of American adults are Facebook users. Among 18 to 24-year-olds, 78% use Instagram and 45% are on Twitter. Even among Americans 65 and older, 37% are social media users.

Having access to all those customers helps you boost traffic, particularly for new site content. When you post a new blog or update your homepage, it can take a while to get traction with Google. That means very few customers will know the new content is there until the next time they’re searching for your product or service.

Social media posts provide an opportunity for the public to find your new web content and click through to your site.

And because those posts will primarily show up in the feeds of followers and people interested in your product, that traffic is typically very targeted. It won’t just boost your traffic numbers — it will bring in the type of visitors you want to attract.

The traffic benefits of social media marketing can be dramatic. If we’ve shown the importance of social media marketing, now we’ll cover specifics on how to get the most from it.

1 Using social media for business boosts your site’s SEO.

Search engine crawlers know which pages are consistently earning traffic and which are just floating out there, forgotten and ignored. Although your killer content strategy is the most important factor in your search rankings, driving traffic to your optimized pages will cause them to climb much faster. A lot of times, this can be as simple as re-sharing evergreen content (of course, in addition to sharing your new content when it goes live). We recommend each post be re-shared once a month — a task that doesn’t have to be as time-intensive as you might think. With Facebook’s scheduling tool or Hootsuite (for Twitter), you can set the entire month all at once and you’re done.

2 Social media can increase your reach via quoted experts.

This is one of our very favourite benefits of social media marketing. Let’s say you quoted someone with a killer social media presence. Of course, you’re going to email them a link to the post when it goes live and encourage them to share it, but leveraging your own social media channels will help you go the extra mile here.

In your tweet and Facebook post sharing your new content, be sure to tag the experts you quoted so they see it pop up in their notifications.

Doing so makes it far more likely your source will share or retweet the link to their thousands (or tens of thousands) of followers, which drives traffic back to your website. It’s a win-win all around.

Doing this three things from now with your business will go a long way to increase your sales, credibility and overall increase to your business. There is no better time to start than now. If you haven’t created your social media accounts, now is the best time to do so. There is some juice you are missing if you don’t have a social media page. Take action now!