Socialexaminer.com conducted a study this year on the benefits of social media marketing among a significant number of online marketers.

The conclusions?

85% of them gained more exposure for their business, followed by increasing traffic to the website promoted (63%). 56% revealed the fact that social media activity brought them new business partnerships, 54% were helped by social media to increase the rise in the search rankings, 52% generated qualified leads, 48% sold more products/ services and 48% had savings in the overall marketing budget.

Social Media has not to be seen as a medium where you can advertise your business at a lower budget. Social Media creates communities and your presence there as a person, business or both has the purpose of making a contribution to that community. You can contribute through text, links, images, videos and everything which will help that community evolve and grow. Selling, gaining new partnerships and the money you will earn through social media are just effects of the quality of your social media presence.

If you will post only sales messages you will have sooner or later the surprise that you will be left out. It is recommended to have no more than 1 sales posts among 10 (so 10%) this way nobody will feel that you are there to sell. All of us have something to sale and from how you can manage not to sell in social media you can have positive or negative effects. Here we speak about the regular social media activity.

If we refer to the paid ads inside of social media, they have to be made in a way which will bring qualified leads and customers, huh? A very special attention have to be paid to how you design your ads because as you can see on Facebook, users can “like” your ads or not. In the case of paid ads the users accept the fact that you want to sell to them but judge you about how you do this.