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If you want to stay relevant with your business you have to start using social media to promote your business. More and more small and big businesses are realizing the importance of social media in business. Social media and business will always be connected, so check out these top reasons for using social media for business.
Today, there are more than 3 billion people all across the globe using social media networks and many of these could be your target customers. This reflects the importance of social media.
If you do not take advantage of social media for promoting your business, you’re losing a cheap but effective means of wooing customers.
97% markets make use of social media and 78% salespeople are able to outsell the competition because they use social media for promoting the business.
Why use social media for business?
Here are the Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Head Over to Social Media to Promote Your Business
#1. Increase Brand Awareness by Using Social Media for Business
- Using social sites, you can ask your fans/followers to share your business related posts. This can be done by retweeting or repinning or just sharing an image on Instagram, thereby spreading the word about your brand and getting new followers and fans for your product.
- As an effective means of social media marketing, you could hold a contest and allow followers to share the news. Reward your fans for every share.
- Your fans can access fresh and valuable content more easily through social media. This increases loyalty to your brand.
- When you ask questions, share product benefits and show them the value of your products, they respond with positive remarks and comments… This works like a testimonial showing they are happy with your product, being one of the top uses of social media.
Tip: You can even give a free demo of your product or a trial offer with money back guarantee. When you do this using social media, you get more likes/shares and the word spreads, increasing brand awareness.
#2. Humanising a Brand
- Social media is a place where your target customers can actually see your personality. You can be humorous here, offer some entertainment and bring out a human side to your brand. This helps in better connections with your audience.
Note: For instance, Zomato has an entertaining method for communicating with people and this increases engagement with such posts.
(Image: madovermarketing.com)
- While considering marketing through social media, you can post funny memes and pictures; share interesting tidbits about your company; give them a behind the scenes experience and have a friendly chat with your customers. Such small gestures could help in building rapport with your customers and gaining loyalty.
- When you humanise your brand, your customers get more attached to your company. People are more interested in buying from a person rather than from an anonymous brand. If a brand behaves arrogantly without remaining in touch with its customers on social media, people will also avoid them, just the way we avoid arrogant people in our life.
Tip: How to use social media for business? Have a chat day or just hold a Twitter party or a fun competition once in a way.
- One of the benefits of social media for business is that it gives you an opportunity for blending online and store experiences. For instance, Nordstrom makes use of Pinterest to check out items popular with their followers and then highlights these products in their store.
#3. Awareness of Target Customers
Without social media it’s nearly impossible to connect with your target customers.That is why small businesses need social media. One of the benefits of social media marketing is that you can find out where they typically hang out, you can prioritize your time and spend it on that location.
You have to first identify the type of people you are targeting based on their age, demographics, behavior and interests or location. For instance, women in a particular location interested in beauty products. You can then use Facebook for finding out the number of women matching this persona using Facebook Ads.
- You could ask your customers about the social media site that they frequent to get information about your business.
Tip: For instance, you can use Google Forms for collecting answers, as part of a strategy of social media marketing for small business.
- Identify the demographics of your best customers and save them. Create a custom audience. You can then use social media campaigns in Facebook or Instagram and reach out to them for selling your products.
- You can find your target audience based on interests or pages that they have liked; based on those who watched your videos; those who like your page; friends of your fans; targeting based on behavior and so on.
Tip: Use Facebook Graph searches or the Interests Suggestions.
#4. Ways Businesses Use Social Media: Offering Customer Service
(Image: freshsparks.com)
Check out the above example. Even though the customer had not directly mentioned the company on Twitter, they were listening using social monitoring tools and were able to make a sale.
Another benefit of social media is that you can listen to your customers and offer them service through these channels. 67% customers use social media for customer service.
- Though you can always offer support through phone or email, you can respond immediately to reviews or complaints through social media.
- Your customers can view your response times on your Facebook business page.
- You can reply to customers immediately using Twitter, that too using just 280 characters, which doesn’t take much time.
Tip: use Direct Messages (DM) in case of negative issues.
#5. Promoting Content
How to market your business on social media? Even after creating an epic blog post, you still have to get it across to your target customers. The most amazing content is nothing without the target audience. That’s exactly where social media comes to the rescue.
- You can use Facebook Like buttons on your post.
- You can share your post in different ways for different media like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
- You can tag relevant people to increase the reach within the community.
Tip: Use the Facebook ads to increase engagement for your post with Boost campaign. It increases Page likes; increases traffic and engagement.
#6. SEO Ranking
Which business does not want to rank high on search pages? Your social media interactions could enhance your search engine ranking. A social media presence for business doesn’t directly help you rank better, but they do help each other indirectly.
- When you create good content and promote it on social media, people will like it and they will link to it. This will boost your SE rankings.
(Image: lyfemarketing.com)
- Search engine spiders crawl over your social media posts and index them to improve your search engine ranking. This is especially so if your post gets a lot of attention on Twitter or Facebook or if it goes viral. These ripples will also be felt in the search engine results.
#7. Getting Competitive Intelligence
You can gather and analyse intelligence regarding your competitors, their products, sales, promotional strategies etc. through social media.
- You can leverage the data regarding the competition to find new business opportunities. Get information on their campaigns and how consumers engage with them.
- Checking out your target audience’s reaction or response to the competitors’ marketing efforts to learn which strategy works better.
- Check out the channels or topics that your competitors are engaging in and you can get insights to improve your campaigns.
Tip: For instance, if a competitor has recently increased Twitter postings or started interacting more on LinkedIn? Maybe, this was because of increased customer exchanges on the platform.
#8. Managing a Crisis
Every business needs to put in place an effective crisis management strategy. When something goes wrong with your business, it harms your reputation. You can use social media effectively to manage and repair your reputation.
- You can take full responsibility for your mistakes publicly or even privately.
- It proves to your customers that you are always accessible and that you won’t shy away from responsibility.
- Social media gives your business immediate access to feedback in Twitter, Instagram, etc. You can listen in to people and their reactions during a crisis or a problem related to your company.
- You can then craft a different message for different demographics affected by the issue, so that there is no confusion among your customers.
Note: When a McDonald employee attacked one customer, the company reacted by apologizing to the victim privately and also gave reassurance to the public on social media telling them that the employee had been fired.
#9. Increasing Sales
- You can join communities and improve your brand name so that it gains more reliability as a brand.
- You can then connect with existing customers and potential ones by interacting with them and responding to them.
- Next, you find ways to sell your products, without being perceived as a pushy salesman. You can put links on your social media page and give them more information about your service to increase sales.
#10. Staying Relevant
Companies run the risk of becoming outdated and this could threaten the brand. With changes in trends, it is important to change your strategy and adapt all the time. Social media can help you keep a pulse on the market.
- Reading content on social media will help you get insights into new marketing strategies.
- You can join networking groups on social media and learn firsthand about recent trends in your industry.
Tip: For instance, you can stay active on LinkedIn groups and connect with other like-minded peers to get helpful resources to improve your business.
- Another way to stay relevant using social media is to create your list of Twitter influencers. You can even subscribe to a list created by others to follow industry experts.
Wrap Around
You might lose the race if you wait too long. Social media marketing could increase traffic, customers, conversions and do a lot more for your business as can be seen from the above. Social media is here to stay! It’s not going away any time soon.
Don’t leave anything to chance. By going that extra mile and using social media for your business, you become a pro instead of a wannabe! It’s just that little bit of additional effort that could catapult you to a whole new level of achievement.
Cover photo by Pixabay
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