Using social networks to market your site increases your presence on the web. 

The biggest trend on the internet to date is the movement towards social media and social media marketing, where the users create content themselves. This is good news for your website because, as the internet becomes more social, search engine optimisation (SEO) will move away from matching algorithms to creating and marketing original ideas. 

Social media marketing can help drive targeted traffic to your website.
This happens when you create a profile page on asocial media network, like Facebook. This page should have a link to your company’s website in order to garner this traffic. Users of the social network can find your page, like or friend you and then go to your site to find out more about you. 

The ways in which you can use social media to create brand awareness are endless and as such, may seem daunting and confusing. A good SEO company can offer social media management. This means that they create a page for you and keep it up to date in order to effectively market your company on social media sites. 

The four most used social media networks in South Africa are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.
Each of these offers various ways in which you can market your business.

Twitter allows you to create a profile for your company and lets you ‘tweet’ updates about your company. Twitter allows for a close relationship with your followers since you will be able to respond to comments, complaints and queries in real time. 

LinkedIn is a social network that connects professionals with one another. By creating an account for yourself on LinkedIn, you can spread the word about your company and reach users who work in a similar field. This allows you to learn about the latest trends in your field and to keep up with your competitors. You can also ask questions of other users and find out how they go about marketing themselves. 

Facebook offers on page advertising that is targeted towards Facebook users. Facebook attempts to display ads on a user’s profile that are relevant to that user. Facebook advertisers can use information that is given to them by Facebook to create ads that target specific locations, language, demographics, etc. 

Instagram is a social networking app made for sharing photos and videos from a smartphone. Similar to Facebook or Twitter, everyone who creates an Instagram account has a profile and a news feed. You are able to tag other users to it and share posts to some of your other social networks. With the new tools, companies of all sizes can be recognised with a business profile, get insights about followers and posts and promote posts to drive business objectives – all within the Instagram mobile 

 

 
Facebook remains the most popular platform in the country, with about 16 million users, that is 30% of the population. Of which 14 million, access the site from mobile devices
Tweeting activity in South Africa continues throughout the week, although the most popular day is Thursday. Twitter is most used in the morning, between 8am and 9am, with a peak again in the evenings at about 6pm.
 
The professional social network LinkedIn has grown quite a bit since 2017, with the platform growing its local numbers to 6.1 million users from 5.5 million.
Instagram has also seen significant growth, with its South African user numbers up 8.5% to 3.8 million users, however this is significantly slower than previous years.
While the YouTube numbers aren’t present, globally, the video platform has hit 1.3 billion active users.
In South Africa, the average channel now has 250,000 subscribers, up from 36,000 in 2016, showing a major shift in local internet users’ consumption of media.
 
Facebook 2017- 16.0 million
Twitter 2017- 8.0 million
LinkedIn 2017- 6.1 million
Instagram 2017 – 3.8 million