What are the advantages of utilizing social media for business? Consider that there are now over 4.2 billion active social media users worldwide.
If you’re not incorporating social media into your digital marketing Skills or strategy, you’re passing up a quick, low-cost, and effective way to reach nearly half of the world’s population.
Let’s take a look at the various ways social media can assist you in connecting with your target audience, engaging with customers, and growing your business.
Online digital marketing courses are also one of the best way to learn the best techniques about social media marketing.
TABLE OF CONTENT
- Benefits of Social Media for Brand Building
- Benefits of Social Media for Business Growth
- Social media benefits for content creation and distribution
- The Advantages of Social Media for Communication
- The advantages of social media for gaining insights
- The Advantages of Social Media for Advertising
- Benefits of social media for brand building
- Increase brand awareness
With more than half of the world’s population using social media, platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are natural places to reach new and highly targeted potential customers.
Do you believe that people only connect with brands they already know on social media? Consider that 83% of Instagram users say they find new products on the platform.
Still house Spirits achieved a 17-point increase in ad recall when it ran a Facebook campaign to increase brand awareness among outdoor enthusiasts.
- Make your brand more human.
One of the most important advantages of social media for business is the ability to make genuine human connections (also known as Meaningful Relationship Moments). Introduce your followers to the people who make up your company and demonstrate how current customers use and benefit from your products.
Authenticity fosters trust. In turn, trust increases marketing receptivity and drives new business. And social media is the best place to be authentic!
Show how you’re living up to your brand’s values, how your product works in practise, and how you prioritise the needs of your employees and customers.
- Develop your brand as a thought leader.
According to the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer, while there has been a recent shift toward distrust of government, non-governmental organisations, and the media, business is an institution with a 61 percent level of trust. People look to brands for insights and information… and there’s no better place to share that than on social media.
Whatever industry you are in, social media allows you to establish your brand as a thought leader—the go-to source for information on topics related to your niche.
When it comes to establishing thought leadership, LinkedIn—particularly the LinkedIn Publishing Platform—is a great place to start. Ryan Holmes, chairman and co-founder of Hootsuite, has over 1.7 million LinkedIn followers, where he shares his thoughts on social media and entrepreneurship.
- Maintain top-of-mind awareness
According to a 2021 Pew Research Center study, 70% of social media users log in at least once per day, and many people (49%) admit to checking social multiple times per day.
Every time a fan or follower logs in to social media, you have the opportunity to connect with them. Keep your social posts entertaining and informative, and your followers will be happy to see your new content in their feeds, keeping you top of mind so you’re their first stop when they’re ready to buy.
Of course, this does not imply that you should be glued to your accounts 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A scheduling tool, such as Hootsuite, can assist you in planning your social media content for posting ahead of time.
- Benefits of Social Media for Business Growth
- Boost website traffic
Social media posts and advertisements are effective ways to drive traffic to your website. Sharing great content from your blog or website on social media is a great way to get readers as soon as you publish a new post. (UTM tracking tags can even be used to collect data on click-throughs!)
Participating in social chats can also help you increase your visibility, attract new people’s attention, showcase your expertise, and drive traffic to your website. (However, make sure to go beyond self-promotion to provide genuine value!)
Include your website address in all of your social media profiles so that anyone interested in learning more about you can do so with a single click.
- Create leads
With ad targeting options such as demographic information, geography, language, and even online behaviours, 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, with ad targeting options including demographic information, geography, language, and even online behaviours. Potential customers can express interest in your company and products through social media in a simple and low-commitment manner. Lead generation is such an important benefit of social media for businesses that many social networks have advertising formats designed specifically to collect leads.
McCarthy and Stone, for example, used Facebook lead ads to allow people interested in learning more about their real estate projects to learn more about the properties with just a few taps.
The ads resulted in 4.3 times more sales leads than the previous year, at a cost that was twice as low as more traditional digital prospecting campaigns with real estate ads.
- Increase sales
Your social accounts are an important part of your sales funnel, which is the process by which a new contact becomes a customer. (Lingo alert: this is referred to as social selling!)
Social networks will become increasingly important for product search and ecommerce as the number of people using social media grows and social sales tools evolve. The time has come to align your social marketing efforts with your sales objectives.
- Collaborate with influencers
Consumer decisions are heavily influenced by recommendations from friends and family, as well as reviews. When you get people talking about your product or company on social media, you increase brand awareness and credibility, as well as your chances of selling more.
Collaboration with influencers—people who have a large social media following and can draw that following’s attention to your brand—is a key way to drive social word of mouth.
Adore Me partnered with influencers for a series of unboxing videos on Instagram, and saw a significant increase in traffic from content that was showcased directly in the influencers’ accounts. This included a doubling of the click-through rate and a 7% increase in sales conversion rate.
- Social media benefits for content creation and distribution
Promote your content on social media Promoting your content on social media is a great way to get your smart, well-researched content in front of new people, demonstrating your expertise, and growing your audience.
For example, Hootsuite used infographics to share fun facts and stats from their latest Digital 2021 global report with their Twitter audience.
To get the most out of social media for business, make sure you have a content marketing strategy in place.
- Go viral
People who like, comment on, and share your social posts expose your content to new audiences—their friends and followers. This concept is taken a step further when it goes viral.
As people share your content with their networks and their networks share it with their networks, your content spreads across the internet, potentially receiving thousands or even millions of shares.
This exposure is especially valuable because, in a world where there is far more content than any one person could ever consume, a friend’s social share functions as a kind of pre-screening.
Of course, going viral is a difficult task, but it would be nearly impossible without social media.Being on social media also means that your followers can assist you in achieving this goal. For example, when one TikTok user choreographed Grammarly’s YouTube ad audio, it sparked a trend of 100,000-plus users doing the same.
- Source material
There are two primary methods for businesses to source content for social media:
Source ideas: Ask your followers what they want, or engage in social listening to generate content ideas for yourself. Simply put, give people what they want. It’s a sure way to produce content that people will want to read and share.
Posting material sources: Make a contest or use a hashtag to find user-generated content (UGC) to share. Engaging your followers can increase brand awareness while also providing you with a library of social posts to share over time.
- The Advantages of Social Media for Communication
- Management of one’s reputation
Whether or not you’re present to respond, your customers are already talking about you on social media. If you and your team are alert, you can detect important social posts about your brand and highlight the positive while addressing the negative before it becomes a major issue.
For example, if people post about their dissatisfaction with a poor customer service experience.
- Communication during a crisis
Is there a plan in place for dealing with a crisis at your company? While small businesses may not experience a crisis on the same scale as, say, Starbucks, a smaller number of shares can have a devastating impact within a close-knit community or niche.
When it comes to responding to crises on social media, silence is not an option. Maintaining well-run and managed social accounts, as well as having a plan in place, can help ensure that you’re present and ready to engage if the worst happens.
- Customer and audience participation
Social media platforms enable you to interact directly with customers and fans, as well as give them the opportunity to interact directly with your brand. Unlike traditional media, which only allows for one-way communication, social media allows for two-way communication.
You must be engaged if you want your customers and followers to be engaged. Maintain an active presence on social media and respond to comments and questions on your own posts in a way that is appropriate for your brand.
You can also use social media monitoring to keep track of what people are saying on social media. Burger King doesn’t just tweet; it also responds to others who mention BK.
- Customer service and support
People expect brands to be available on social media and to seek out their social accounts for customer service — and more than that, roughly half of social media users expect brands to respond to them on social media within three hours.
If you have the right tools, social customer care can coexist with more traditional customer service. A customer service platform, such as Spark central by Hootsuite, can assist you in managing incoming messages from social media, email, text messages, and live chat.
- The advantages of social media for gaining insights
- Find out more about your customers
In real-time, social media generates a massive amount of data about your customers. You can use that data to make better business decisions.
Every major social network provides analytics that provide demographic information about the people who interact with your account. This can assist you in tailoring your social media marketing strategy to better communicate with your target audience.
- Keep an eye on the competition
It’s also critical to be aware of what others are saying about your competitors.Tracking competitor mentions, for example, may reveal pain points with their products or services that you can reach out to address, gaining new customers in the process.
Monitoring your competitors on social media also means you’ll be aware when they launch new products, run promotions, or release new reports or data.
- Be aware of the competition.
It’s also critical to be aware of what your customers are offering. Tracking competitor mentions, for example, may reveal pain points with their products or services that you can reach out to address, potentially gaining new customers.
Monitoring your competitors on social media means you’ll be aware when they introduce new products, run promotions, or release new reports or data.
- Advertising Advantages of Social Media
Social ads are a low-cost way to promote your company and distribute content. They also provide powerful targeting options, allowing you to reach the right audience while making the most of your budget.
This key benefit of social media for business has been embraced by astute marketers: by 2022, advertisers are expected to spend more than $56 billion promoting products on social media.
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, with ad targeting options including demographic information, geography, language, and even online behaviours.
Conclusion
Social media networks are open to all, allowing businesses to track the activities of their customers or potential buyers. This allows marketers to learn more about their target audience’s likes, dislikes, and interests, allowing them to develop a better marketing strategy to attract such customers. You can join Digital Scholar’s Digital Marketing Course in Chennai to grow your career and achieve your high goals. These courses will help you grow your business or your career in digital marketing. Digital Scholar is India’s First Agency based learning institute designed by Sorav Jain to give best quantity training.
Author Bio – Karthikeyan Maruthai
Karthik is a Digital Marketing Head at EchoVme Digital. He heads the development team, SEO team at echoVME, and a trainer at Digital Scholar. He has been working in the development field for over a decade and is the go-to person for any SEO and tech-related queries.