Social Media has seen a revolution in the last five years. What are the Business benefits?
There are more than 4.2 billion active social media users across the globe.
If you’re not taking advantage of Social Media within your digital marketing strategy, you’re missing out on a fast, inexpensive, and effective way to reach almost half the world’s population.
Here are a few reasons why Social Media is essential for the survival and growth of your business.
Increase brand awareness
With over half of the world’s population using social media, platforms like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, it is an obvious way to reach new and highly targeted potential customers.
Another survey said that 83 percent of Instagram users say they discover new products on the platform.
Introduce your brand
Introduce people to the stars who make up your company and showcase how existing customers are using and benefiting from your products.
Authenticity builds trust. Trust, in turn, can build receptiveness and drive new business.
Show how your product works in real life, and your ethical side by how you’re putting the interests of your employees and customers first.
Increase website traffic
Social media posts and ads are key ways to drive traffic to your website. Sharing great content from your blog or website to your social channels is a great way to get readers as soon as you publish a new post. (You can even use UTM tracking tags to collect data on your click-throughs!)
Participating in social chats can also be a great way to increase your visibility, get attention from new people, showcase your expertise, and drive traffic to your website.
Include your website address in all of your social media profiles so that people who want to learn more about you can do so with one easy click.
Generate leads
Social media offers an easy way for potential customers to express interest in your business and your products. Lead generation is such an important benefit of social media for business that many social networks offer advertising formats specifically designed to collect leads.
Boost sales
Social media is an important sales channel and needs to be part of your selling strategy.
Partner with influencers
Recommendations from friends and family play a huge role in consumer decisions, as do reviews. When people talk about your product or company on social media, you build brand awareness and credibility, and set yourself up for more sales.
One key way to drive social word of mouth is to partner with influencers, people who have a large following on social media and can draw the attention of that following to your brand.
Customer and audience engagement
Social networks allow you to interact directly with customers and likewise give them the chance to interact directly with your brand. Unlike traditional media, which offers only one-way communication, social media is bidirectional.
If you want customers and followers to be engaged, you have to be engaged yourself. Stay active and respond to comments and questions on your own social media posts.
You can also use social media monitoring to keep an eye on what people are saying across the social web.
Customer service and customer support
People expect brands to be available on social media and seek out their social accounts for customer service. About half of social media users expect a response from brands on social media within three hours.
Social customer care can go hand in hand with more traditional customer service.
Learn more about customers
Social media generates a huge amount of data about customers in real-time. That information can be used to make smarter business decisions.
All of the major social networks offer analytics that provide demographic information about the people interacting with your account. This can help tailor a social media marketing strategy.
Measure the success of your brand
It’s a key source of intelligence about your brand. While it’s important to know how much people are talking about you online, it’s also important to know what they’re actually saying — and feeling — about your brand.
Lots of mentions could be a good thing… but if you’re getting lots of mentions with a negative sentiment, you need to do some quick thinking to figure out what’s gone wrong and address the problem.
Watch the competition
For example, tracking mentions of your competitors might reveal negative aspects of your products or services that you could address.
Monitoring the competition on social media also means you’ll be aware when your competitors launch new products, run promotions and release new reports or data.
Stay on top of industry news
Keeping a virtual ear to the ground through social listening is a way to stay informed about upcoming changes to your industry that could affect the way you do business.
Benefits of social media for advertising
Targeted advertising
Social ads are an inexpensive way to promote your business and distribute content. They also offer powerful targeting options so that you can reach the right audience and make the most of your budget.
With ad targeting options including demographic information, geography, language, and even online behaviors, you can craft specific messages that best speak to different groups of potential customers, and only pay for the exact viewers you want to reach.
Retargeting
Nearly 70 percent of online shopping carts are abandoned.
People who have abandoned products in a shopping cart are prime potential customers. They have already found your website, browsed your products, and made a decision about what they might want. People abandon shopping carts for many reasons, but someone who has expressed this degree of interest in your company should not be ignored.
Using tracking tools like the Facebook pixel, you can show these potential customers social media ads for the exact products they have browsed on your website or placed in the shopping cart.
Reporting and analytics
With social media tracking and analytics tools, you can see the full impact of your social media activities, from follows to engagements right through to purchases.