Social media in business has grown exponentially year after year. Research reveals that there are up to 4.2 billion social media users across the globe. In addition, 84% of U.S. adults between 18 and 29 years use social media actively.
The fact is that social media is powerful and omnipresent. And if you’re not benefiting from it for your digital marketing strategy, you’re missing out on the opportunity to effectively connect with up to half of the world’s population.
Let’s discuss the top benefits of social media for businesses and what the best platforms are:
A Quick Glance at the Pros of Using Social Media in Businesses
Social media helps you and your brand enjoy:
- Attract new customers while fostering connections with old customers
- Build customer networks and advertise to increase revenue
- Conduct in-depth market research while reducing marketing costs
- Develop your brand
- Exchange business ideas to improve your strategies and techniques
- Get insightful customer feedback to improve your content and products/services
- Increase website traffic and enhance its search engine ranking
- Stay up-to-date with what your competitors are doing
Benefits of Social Media for Brand Building
These are the pros of using social media for brand building:
Enhance Brand Awareness
One benefit of using social media in business is that it helps build awareness for your brand and your products/services.
You can enhance brand awareness on social media in business by:
- Encouraging your followers to share and comment on your posts by adding attractive CTA’s and incentives
- Introducing fun contests to engage fans and viewers and distribute prizes for the winners
- Posting fresh, informative, and valuable content to create trust and authority with your consumer base
- Building a loyal audience by interacting with your audience in the comment section or DMs
Create Brand Recognition
In our modernized world, consumers want to purchase from brands they recognize and trust. Thus, gaining brand recognition is every business’ top marketing goal.
Fortunately, social media helps you quickly and effectively build brand recognition:
- Focus on building trust and credibility by upholding your word and delivering on your promises
- Post tips, how-to videos, advice, and questions to captivate your audience’s attention and engage with them
- Create a unique design and stick to a consistent image. It includes adding your logo to your images, well-designed graphics, and colors, creating a user-friendly web design, and ensuring an aesthetic profile.
- Post once or twice a week. In addition, make sure you post strategically at the ideal timing to get better initial engagement.
- Tailor your content according to your consumer’s likes and dislikes. It helps increase the comments and likes on your profile.
Humanize Your Brand
Humanize your brand to create brand recognition, stand out from your competition, and allow buyers to relate to your brand. Share your stories, convictions, and struggles with your readers to connect with customers on a personal level. These are a few questions that help you personify your brand and create its unique identity:
- What are your brand values?
- How does your business look for the interests of its consumer base
- How well are you taking care of your employees?
Plus, comments and personal messages offer you the perfect opportunity to create a human connection. Instead of automating responses, provide a personalized response to show that you care for your customers.
Leverage social media to create real human connections to boost your engagement and sales effectively.
Become an Industry Thought Leader on Online Platforms
According to the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer, there has been an increase in distrust in NGOs, the Government, and the media. In addition, businesses have a 61% trust level and are also the only trusted institution.
Today, people want insights and information from brands with a solid reputation. Luckily, social media provides you with the perfect opportunity to create one. By sharing valuable insights on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, etc., you can establish yourself as a thought leader regardless of your area of expertise.
This way, you can become your customers’ go-to place for information and insights in your niche.
Stay Top of Mind
According to insightful research by the Pew Research Center, 70% of people log into their social media accounts at least once every day. In addition, up to 49% of people check their accounts multiple times. Through social media, you can connect with followers and fans whenever they log in. Make sure your social posts are informative and engaging so that your followers look forward to seeing your content in their feeds.
Plus, your followers will keep top of mind making you their first stop when they want to create a new purchase.
Benefits of Social Media for Growth
Discussed below are some of the most valuable benefits that social media offer for business growth and recognition:
Direct Referral Traffic to Your Blog/Site
Social media marketing is beneficial for directing customers to your website. In fact, social media channels help you gain diverse inbound traffic.
However, to achieve this, you need to consider what, when, and how often you’re going to post. As a brand manager, you shouldn’t be inactive or overtly active on various social media platforms. In both cases, you’ll chase away your customers.
Instead, set a schedule for posting your content on different social media channels. According to insightful research, it’s advisable that you post on Instagram at least 2 to 3 times per week. At the same time, experts believe that you should post at least 1 to 2 times per day on Facebook.
Identify the ideal time and day to post on these social media channels to attract organic traffic streams.
Improve Link Building
Social media also indirectly affect your SEO ranking. For instance, if you get 1,000 shares on your blog post, chances are, some of your followers may write similar content and link it back to your original post.
Search engines like Google and Bing will notice that your content has been linked to and rank your post higher.
Generate Organic Leads
Social media platforms offer potential customers an easy way to show interest in your brand and your products and services. Lead generation is one of the benefits social media contributes to businesses aiming to improve traffic and increase sales.
Most businesses implement strategic marketing tactics to capture qualified leads and direct them to your sales funnel. Generating sales leads offers you the opportunity to make special offers to potential customers and convert them into loyal consumers.
Manage Your Reputation
Even if you’re inactive on social media, people will still talk about your brand across different platforms. The fact is what your viewers say about you is more powerful than what you do.
If you’re not social, people can malign your brand without your knowledge. Luckily, if you’re social, you can easily send a response to unhappy customers. Here’s what you can achieve with your account:
- Satisfy your disgruntled customer
- Impress other viewers by how well you handle the situation
Partner with Influencers
Engaging with influencers with a significant following on social media is a great way to increase your followers on social media platforms. It is because connecting with influencers helps you attract the attention of those followers to increase brand identity and, ultimately, sales.
Boost Your Sales
The importance of social media channels has increased, especially for eCommerce businesses, due to the increasing online population. Therefore, you can easily generate sales and improve brand recognition via social media channels.
A great way to drive sales is to identify which platforms your target customers spend time on. Next, create high-quality content without making it sound too saleasy. More importantly, include CTAs in your organic posts to generate leads.
Advantages of Social Media in Business
Let’s now discuss the advantages of social media for businesses:
Customer and Audience Engagement
Social media platforms allow you to communicate with your fans and customers directly. At the same time, users get the chance to interact with your brand. If you want to promote activity on your social media channels, you need to participate and interact on behalf of your brand. Make sure you’re active and respond to comments and queries in a timely fashion.
You may even use social media monitoring tools like Hootsuite, Brandwatch, Talkwalker, and others to monitor customer engagement with your brand.
Connect with Your Audience through Social Listening
Social listening involves monitoring social media channels and social conversations around specific topics. It’s a helpful way of understanding your ideal audience’s likes and dislikes, as well as identifying trends your audience actively follows. It also helps you figure out your audience’s pain points, allowing you to create content that addresses those points. Not just this, but you can also pinpoint the tone, language, and style your target audience uses.
Strengthen Competitive Advantage Through New Connections
Apart from capturing qualified leads, you must foster deep connections with partners, suppliers, and the overall employment market. Luckily, one benefit of social media for businesses is that it helps you connect with other industry leaders. With a bit of hunting and luck, you can find a new, valuable supplier, strengthen your links with influential industry figures, create a new strategic relationship, or source industry experts willing to work with or for you.
Offer Exceptional Customer Service to Keep Your Followers Happy
Customers expect companies to answer their queries and handle requests via social media platforms in today’s digital era.
Investing in exceptional customer service can assist in building meaningful and lasting relationships with your customers. In addition, with social media, you can enjoy immediate interactions and customer feedback.
In fact, businesses can respond to customers’ questions within seconds. With up to half of the U.S. consumer base using social media to ask questions about the brand and its products/services, ensuring incredible customer service is increasingly important.
Gauge Sentiment Around Your Business
Social media monitoring is vital to ensure audience engagement and brand building. In addition, it’s also a key source of brand intelligence. As important as it is to figure out how much people are talking about you, it’s also necessary that you identify what they’re saying and feeling about your business.
Getting lots of mentions and tags can be a good thing; however, if most of it is with a negative sentiment, you need to figure out the problem and address it. Using social media platforms allows you to stay up-to-date with sentiment analysis. In addition, you can effectively protect your brand’s reputation and image.
Use Hashtags to Enhance Your Reach
Hashtags are an effective and straightforward way of increasing your content reach. For instance, if you use social media for marketing, you can use hashtags to relate to viral topics, related topics, and so on. People often search for trending hashtags, and including them in your post increases the chances of getting new visitors. Plus, using hashtags is entirely free and can help boost engagement.
Benefits of Social Media for Content Creation and Distribution
Social media also benefits content creation and distribution. Here’s how:
Promote Content
Strategically promote your content across social media platforms to get your insightful and informative content in front of your target audience to boost your expertise. Likewise, it can effectively grow your audience as well.
Here’s how you should promote content on social channels to ensure your social media promotion doesn’t fail:
- Use analytical tools to identify the best time to post your content. Consider testing different times and days to figure out the ideal posting time successfully.
- Add context to your posts by adding a catchy tagline and caption instead of just posting a link to your latest blog.
- Hashtags are a great way to drive traffic on your social media profile. Use revolutionary hashtag tools like Hashtagify to find out which ones are most popular.
- Consider investing in test promotion to increase your consumer base. Start small and focus on traffic instead of inorganic clicks and comments.
Go Viral by Thinking Outside the Box
To increase content virality on social media, you have to think of original, unique, unusual, and highly entertaining ideas.
For increasing brand engagement, you need to think big and think outside the box. Although it’s not easy, if you do go viral, your fans and followers will increase significantly in a short time.
Apart from that, you can increase your followers by creating viral ads. In this, businesses curate a social media calendar to manage campaigns weekly or monthly. The drives use popular hashtags to attract customers, encourage them to visit your website, and continue engaging with your brand.
Source Content
Social media allows you to source content in two main ways:
– Sources Ideas- Add an Instagram or Facebook story asking your followers what they wish to see next. Or you can use social listening to create fresh and unique content ideas. By creating content your viewers want, you can rest assured they will read and share it.
– Source Material for Posts- Create a fun contest or use hashtags to share user-generated content. Engaging your fans not only helps build excitement about your brand but also provides you with an endless library of interactive social media posts.
Understanding the Advantages of Online Review Management for Businesses
Here are a couple of bonus benefits of using social media in business:
Offer Unbiased Reviews on Your Business and Its Products/Services
People often use social media in business to determine their credibility and online reputation. In addition, to build trust for your company, you need to ensure a robust social presence alongside a significant number of unbiased reviews.
Respond to Customer Complaints Quickly
Make sure your customers are up-to-date with new policies and rules and regulations and focus on quickly responding to their complaints through social media. People will talk and discuss your company regardless of whether you’re engaging with them or not. Ensure these conversations are positive by offering them high-quality products and services. It helps in increasing your brand’s profits, as well as in driving organic traffic.
Crisis Communication
Your company must have a well-thought-out plan for dealing with a different crisis. While it’s true that small businesses are unlikely to come across a problem that blows up to a huge scale, the fact remains that it has a devastating impact on your brand’s image.
Staying silent and ignoring the situation is not a viable option for crises on social media platforms. Instead, maintain well-run social accounts and prepare a plan to ensure you can engage even if the worst happens.
How Does Social Media Increase ROI of Businesses?
Social media offers businesses the perfect opportunity to boost and prove ROI. Here are a couple of ways you can achieve this:
Reporting and Analytics
Often marketers find it challenging to prove their return on investment. However, there is an array of revolutionary social media tracking and analytics tools that allow you to stay updated with your social media activities. From the number of purchases right down to engagement rates, these tools make it easy for you to track and analyze your online performance.
Social media tracking tools like Google Analytics, UTM Parameters, and Hootsuite Impact not only help you track website traffic from conversions, social media, as well as ROI for different campaigns.
Quantify Your ROI More Than Other Marketing Efforts
Quantifying the impact of traditional media can be a Herculean task. Therefore, you invest significant money and time in TV commercials or radio spots in hopes that a customer sees or hears it, finds it attractive, and responds.
On the contrary, a social media campaign helps you track your viewer tool from a specific piece of content. This action may be a reshare, visit your website, a purchase, and much more.
Lower Advertising Costs than Traditional Media
As per recent studies, social media is cheaper than other forms of marketing and advertising, including traditional marketing.
In fact, most advertising mediums require high front-end investments. For instance, you’ll have to reserve a TV commercial slot or produce a radio ad for hundreds of dollars upfront for traditional marketing.
After that, you’ll have to worry about additional costs of production, editing, casting, and much more.
Which Social Media Platforms Should Businesses Use?
Here we’ve discussed the most commonly used social media in business:
– Facebook- You can use Facebook to share engaging photos, videos, and even critical business updates. Plus, its business account allows you to unlock powerful advertising and analytical tools
– Instagram- With up to 1 billion active users, Instagram is an excellent way of enhancing your brand outreach. Keep in mind that the platform is highly visual; thus, you need to have strong visual content.
– LinkedIn- LinkedIn has up to 303 active users every month and is an excellent platform for networking. A forum for professionals, LinkedIn helps you connect with industry experts, and interact and network with various stakeholders. In addition, you can post job openings within your company. It builds credibility and expertise within the market.
– Twitter- is an excellent platform for engaging with followers, adding short updates, and sharing links to blogs. This social media channel, therefore, allows you to share tweets, videos, images, links, and much more to increase followers and drive traffic.
– Snapchat- Snapchat is a mobile-only and highly visual platform that allows you to send snaps, create stories, send messages, update events, and much more. You can therefore boost your audience on Snapchat by creating interactive and unique content.
Why Should You Use Socialays to Manage Social Media in Business?
Socialays is a revolutionary AI-based social media assistant that helps businesses assess their comments to increase brand awareness and revenue. Here are the perks of using Socialays:
- The platform reads your comments and analyzes them in real-time to help you understand whether it’s positive, negative, or neutral. This way, you can decide the best way to respond to the comment.
- Emotion Analyze feature asses and categorizes your comments according to 9 emotions, including happiness, sadness, relief, love, and much more, to ensure you reply appropriately.
- Track your mentions to ensure you engage with customers to improve brand awareness and recognition.
- Socialays also detect questions and spam in your comments to ensure you take the right action at the right time.
- Auto-hide hate speech, spammy content, and profanity to create a positive customer experience.
The Bottom Line
In today’s tech-savvy world, you must leverage social media to boost sales and revenue. In addition, we discuss the top 20 reasons you should use social media in business, its reputation, and score qualified leads.
If staying up-to-date with online reviews, comments, questions, mentions, and requests sounds overwhelming, try Socialays’ free trial. Explore the features of this state-of-the-art tool for up to 14 days for free before you decide to commit to it.
