Social media marketing campaigns are now more popular than ever, but many companies are still not comfortable interacting with their customers outside of their own company website. Unfortunately, these companies are missing out on a huge opportunity to dramatically increase their company’s online presence. Here are five reasons why you should start using social media marketing as soon as possible:

1. Your competitors are probably already using social media marketing. The most popular social media networking websites have millions of active users. Do you really want to allow your competitors to tap into this extremely large global audience without any competition from you?

2. YouTube is one of the world’s largest search engines. More and more people now prefer to watch videos instead of reading large bodies of text in order to get the information that they need. High definition photographs, interactive images and high-quality articles just cannot compete with video and audio. YouTube is one of the best places that you can upload videos showcasing your company’s products and services, as all of the videos on YouTube can be easily shared and distributed. So, it would be foolish not to create a personalized YouTube channel for your company.

3. Twitter is a very powerful social media platform. The platform is accessible on a wide range of devices, and since Tweets are very short messages, they often have more of a promotional impact on consumers. Creating a Twitter account for your company is essential, but it may take a while before you can generate a large number of followers. Therefore, you should also consider paying Twitter users who already have a large number of followers to Tweet about your company’s products and services.

4. Facebook is the world’s most popular social networking site and many of the site’s users login multiple times every day. Depending on your marketing budget, you can purchase advertising on Facebook that is incredibly targeted. You can also create a Facebook page for your company, which will allow you to easily interact with your customers and quickly respond to any questions.

5. Social media marketing is relatively inexpensive and in some cases it is completely free. When you compare the cost of television advertising and internet banner advertising to the cost of social media marketing, you will begin to realize why so many companies are using it. Many companies even find that social media marketing is much more effective than nearly all other types of advertising.

As you can see, there are many reasons why you should start using social media marketing as soon as possible. However, before you start a social media marketing campaign, you should make sure that you do some extensive research so that you can be sure that your campaign will be effective. The last thing you want to do is to spend a lot of time creating, deploying and managing an unsuccessful social media marketing campaign. If you don’t want to spend time learning about social media marketing, you could always employ a social media marketing manager to create and oversee all of your marketing campaigns instead.