5 Reasons Why Social Media is Good for Business
When the Internet came, it changed business forever. Email changed the speed and rate of communication between all parties involved; then came the ability to purchase, trade, and sell goods and services online; the relationship between the internet and business has been growing steadily since. Social Media is a relatively young aspect of the Internet, but it has undoubtedly taken over our daily lives. Information, news, advertising, and marketing are all heavily present in Social Media, making it the new frontier for business to conquer. However, many companies are still late to the party and fail to keep their business active on social media. This means they are leaving an enormous untapped potential for leads simply go to waste. Here at CXGlobals, we’d like to help those companies understand why social media is good for business with this handy list.
1. Social Media is Good for Brand Building
In 2018, the amount of active social media users around the world reached nearly 3.2 billion. Ignoring an audience that size is simply unacceptable for a modern company. Aside from this enormous market, Social Media gives you the ability to target your desired audience specifically. This lets you build brand awareness with your potential clients by reaching out to them directly through their social media and even interact with them directly. With about 50% of social media users logging in to their platform-of-choice several times a day, you can ensure that your brand has plenty of exposure and can easily stay top of mind for many viewers.
Social media also lets you create brand advocacy through existing clients, employees, and partners across social media channels start talking about your brand and sharing your company’s links and posts. This expands your audience network and creates a positive image for your brand. With increased brand awareness and active social media involvement, your brand can become a thought leader within the industry. Industry thought leaders are those brands that people first think of relative to a subject and will be the first source of information they go to. For example, Coca-Cola will always be a thought leader within the soft drink industry just as Nike will be a thought leader for the shoe industry. Thought leadership is a great way to create brand trust and consumer loyalty.
2. Social Media is Good for Growth
Your social media channels will redirect traffic to your website, meaning those interested in your posts and ads will then have an opportunity to interact directly with your website. Whether you post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or any other social media channel, the more followers you have, the higher the possibility they will visit your website and you can then turn them into leads. Social Media is actually one of the cheapest, easiest, and effective methods to drive leads towards your website. Integrating social media channels into your sales funnel. Growing your audience on social media means a potential growth in leads and overall brand and company growth with a relatively low investment. Your social marketing goals and sales goals should be linked and working in tandem.
Social Media also gives you the opportunity to partner with “influencers” who are social media accounts with high-visibility and popularity that have the ability to drive visitors to your brand by simply mentioning or promoting your posts through their own channels. When your brand is mentioned by an influential social media account, it gains both exposure and immediate trust among that account’s followers. Seeking out common-ground influencers for mutually beneficial partnerships is a very effective way to broaden your social media audience.
3. Social Media is Good for Engagement
One of the main benefits behind social media is how directly and quickly you can communicate with your audience. Your community managers (people who manage social media accounts for a living) will be interacting with customers in real-time as they comment on your posts and ask questions or express interest or criticism of your brand. With social media, you can keep your followers up-to-date with the latest and most important news about your brand, products, services, or activities. This level of close engagement builds trust with your audience as they humanize your brand and feel they have a personal relationship with it. How you communicate and values your show your audience defines the voice they hear and the image they see when they think of your brand, so it’s important to make sure you keep a good reputation on social media. Whether its the release of a new product or clarification over a piece of negative publicity, social media is a direct line to your followers’ eyes and ears.
It’s also important to manage a certain level of customer service through your social media channels. Followers will ask questions about your products, services, schedules, and other topics through social media and expect to get clear and straight answers. It’s important to make sure that your community managers know your brand and company values well so that they can provide helpful and truthful answers over social media channels. Social media also lets you see what your customers want from your brand or what they aren’t too happy with, giving you a good barometer for customer satisfaction.
4. Social Media is Good for Insight
Social Media lets learn a lot more about your audience, your market, and your industry with analytics and business intelligence built into the channels. Social media provides an enormous amount of real-time data that can be leveraged to gain helpful insight. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn all track demographic info such as age, sex and geo-location and pairs it with preferences and online behavior. This allows you to construct marketing personas based on the people that are interacting with your brand and target them with strategies specific to their preferences and behavior.
Social media also gives you the opportunity to monitor conversations related to your brand, product, or service and study trends relevant to each subject. The use of #hastags makes it easy to tag your posts and follow what the public is talking about. Your company can even start their own conversations and get the ball rolling on a rising trend.
Competitor insight is also another benefit that can be derived from social media. If your competitors are active on social media, you can keep track of what they are posting and how their audience is reacting to it. A good social media strategy will look for key opportunities to stay one step ahead of your competitors on social media channels and get more people talking about your brand.
5. Social Media is Good for Marketing
With powerful insights, clearly defined marketing personas, and ease of communication, social media can be a great tool for marketing and advertising. Knowing who your audience is, you will be able to target them specifically with social ads. They are relatively inexpensive and have a great potential for conversion since they will be shown to those users that are most likely to respond to them. Newspaper and televised advertising are not only very expensive, but their appeal is decreasing and their effectiveness is limited. Social Media is the media form that people around the world are most interacting with and where they are consuming most of their information, entertainment, and advertising. Social Media also lets you re-target followers that have interacted with your brand before (i.e. clicked on a link, browsed your channel, etc.) and try to reel them back in for a sales conversion. Finally, Social Media advertising and marketing have the benefit of being able to prove ROI with very precise figures. Tracking and analytics tools make it easy to keep track of traffic, conversions, views, likes, shares, and ROI for paid and organic social media advertising campaigns.
If you’re interested in a social media strategy for your company, find more about our services here.
