You know the score. You keep hearing about the magic of social media marketing and how it can grow your business. So you finally did it: you set up profiles on all the social media platforms for your business and automated the cross-posting from one platform to all the rest.

But it doesn’t seem to be working. No matter how often you share your website your follower count and likes don’t increase. And where’s all the traffic to your website that was supposed to happen?

It should come as no surprise that there’s an art to successful social media marketing. And that the benefits are far more than simply getting additional traffic to your site.

• Get recognized. One of the most-discussed ways that social media can help your business is through increased brand recognition. People are much more likely to spend their money on a brand they recognize, and social media can help you do that pretty quickly.
• Build connections. Social media offers your customers a way to engage and interact with you in a more informal, convenient way. If they have a question or comment, you can respond where they are – instead of making them come to you via a phone call or email (and because it’s public everyone else will benefit, too).
• Help your SEO. There might not be a direct link between SEO and social media, but plenty of evidence exists to show that having an active and engaged social presence increases visibility with search engines.
• Highly targeted advertising. Did you know that you can get super in-depth, specific audience targeting for ads on social platforms? Networks like Facebook have a lot of information about their users, which helps businesses get very granular in their ad targeting.
• Learn about your audience. Social media is a great tool for learning what your audience really wants or needs because they’ll tell you. Plus, social media is a great way to do market research. All you have to do is listen!