By now you must have heard about ice bucket challenge. Ice bucket challenge is a social media campaign launched by ALS association to raise awareness for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis(ALS).The challenge is to pour a bucket of ice water on yourself or donate $100 to the ALS Foundation and then call out three of your friends to do the same. This campaign gave incredible success to ALS in terms of public awareness and charitable doantions.ALS Association, received $4 million in donations and welcomed more than 70,000 new donors between July 29 and August 12,

Success of Ice Bucket Campaigns once again demonstrates the power of social media.

Ice Bucket Challenge campaign become successful because it went viral on social media. ALS wisely used social media platform to create awareness by making people to video themselves pouring a bucket of ice water on themselves and post it to social media by tagging the post with #IceBucketChallenge .A properly designed social media campaign gives your a number of benefits.According to Hubspot, 92% of marketers in 2014 claimed that social media marketing was important for their business

Increases Brand awareness

Presence on social media increases your visibility. It makes you more familiar and recognizable

Increases your audience reach

When you build a following, you have access to new audience and existing audience. You can interact with all of them and can keep them engaged. Every blog post, image, video, or comment you share give chance to your audience to react, and every reaction could lead to a site visit

Improves your SEO rankings

Strong social media presence improves your SEO rankings.Though google functions on keywords, sharing on Google+, retweets on Twitter, and to some extent Facebook likes and shares, also matters in search rankings.

Boosts your inbound traffic

In absence of social media, your inbound traffic is restricted to people familiar with your brand and people searching for keywords you currently rank for.The more quality content you share on social media the more inbound traffic will be generated.

Social media if used wisely can give you magical results. The ALS Association is just the latest example of this.