Regardless of the type of business you’re running, social media can help your company connect more strongly with your audience, and contribute to the all-round development of your business, from customer support to marketing and sales.
Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin, Instagram, etc are free, but you do need a strategy and invest time in generating new content. If you’re still hesitating about joining the social media boom, take a look at the seven advantages of social media for business.
Social Media for Business Advantages
- Social media generates additional targeted traffic for your website and boosts your search ranking, improving your organic search engine optimization efforts. A major benefit of social media for business is that it naturally directs interested customers to your website and blog 24/7. At the same time, if your social media marketing generates buzz, and you receive many likes, shares and get others to link to you, Google will not remain indifferent – your search engine ranking will improve.
- Social media makes content geo-targeting straightforward. Major social media networks have tools that empower you to deliver certain types of content to specific demographics based on their current location. You can even locate local customers based on their latest tweets and offer them specific products or services.
- Social media helps you understand your audience better. Enabling you to create more effective marketing campaigns. From Facebook to Twitter, most social media sites come with user-friendly insights or analytics that help you determine the predominant age group or gender of your audience.
- Social media generates leads for your business. The best part is that generating leads with social media is a far cheaper strategy than more traditional web-based lead generation tactics. For example, you can use social media to generate leads by promoting gated content, that requires your audience to like a certain page or provide their email address before they can access the content or download an e-book or white paper.
- Social media generates feedback about your products and services, and can be used as an extension of your customer support service for general problems. If you implement feedback tracking and monitoring as part of your social media strategy, you will have a better idea of the reception your existing or newly launched products or services get. At the same time, you can answer basic customer support questions directly on your social media page.
- Social media can take your content marketing to the next level, promoting viral marketing. The kind of social marketing that social media empowers you to do increases the chances that your articles, videos, or infographics will go viral. Social users love to share, and if your content hits a sweet spot, there’s nothing that will hold back the shares, the comments, the links, and the traffic. A great content distribution platform, social media helps you get your content before your audience faster than other marketing strategies.
- Social media fosters a positive relationship with your customers. Unlike advertising or traditional online marketing, social media marketing isn’t a one-way strategy. It involves and requires communication between brands and companies, and encourages you to interact with your audience, to answer questions, solve problems, and more. Of all marketing strategies available online, social media is the most personal, enabling a two-sided dialog between audience and company that solidifies relationships and builds trust.
Social media for business has many advantages, but only when it’s used effectively, and when the content you distribute through your social media channels manage to engage your audience. That is why you may want to consider investing in social media marketing for business. Even if you run a small business, it’s an investment that pays for itself quickly.