10 Reasons that Emphasize the Importance of Social Media in Business
“I’m going to Uber it home tonight”
You must have heard many people using this phrase, especially the college students, professionals, and the club-goers. If you are thinking this is a phrase that Uber coined, you are absolutely wrong. Uber owes it all to social media.
84% social media users base their purchase decisions on recommendations from their friends. Uber made the maximum out of this by offering rider incentives in exchange for social media shares. All that the riders had to do was share their Uber codes on social media to get their free rides home.
The brilliant idea ended up transforming “Uber” from a noun into a verb, without the company investing much on advertising.
In the 21st century the customers are all online. You don’t have to worry about tele-marketing or selling your products door-to-door. You can do it all at the tap of a button or two.
As an equalizer, social media has been great for marketers. No longer do they have to spend millions of dollars on running their marketing campaigns. All they need to do is understand their audience and publish some creative posts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
It doesn’t matter what your budget is; it doesn’t matter how small your business is; as long as you know how to spend those marketing dollars on social media, you can compete even with the biggest players of the industry.
In fact even those that have millions of dollars to spend on marketing have now turned to social media to maximize their returns.
Social media statistics
Here are a few social media facts that help you understand the importance of social media marketing:
· As of April 2018, the total population across the world stands at 7.6 billion
· Out of these,4.2 billion are on the internet
· 3.03 billion of the 4.2 billion internet users are active on social media
· On an average, each social media user has about 5.54 social media accounts
· A new social media account is opened once every 15 seconds
· On WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger alone, about 60 billion messages are sent per day
Anyone can participate in social media as long as they have a computer with an internet connection or a smart phone with hi speed internet.
With just a little bit of budget you can enjoy the incredible benefits of social media marketing. For small businesses social media marketing is a must-have strategy that is both easy and affordable.
Here are 11 reasons that answer the question ‘why is social media important for business’:
Reason #1: Social Media enables you to Showcase Your Knowledge and Expertise
If you’ve got it, you should surely flaunt it; this is what social media helps you to do. By offering a platform where you can say the right things at the right times, social media helps you communicate with the masses.
You can share your knowledge and expertise and establish yourself as an authority in your niche.
You can get a whole community of like-minded individuals to follow you on social media.
Reason #2: It helps you hone your products and services
It doesn’t matter how great your product or service is; if it doesn’t appeal to your audience the way it needs to, you can make nothing out of it.
Social media gives you a chance to connect with your audience, ask them questions, and gain insights about their requirements and preferences.
Social media makes receiving honest feedback from your customers, easier and faster.
Apart from getting their opinions about your products or services, you can also gather details that you can use to hone your products or services. You can take quick polls or run online surveys in a less time-consuming and inexpensive way.
Reason #3: Through social media you can gain insights from your competitors
Another reason why you should use social media for business is to make better business decisions by using valuable information about your competitors.
You can get the names of your competitors’ products, see what kind of content they are publishing, and find out where and when they are posting. You can also track the number of likes that their Facebook pages get by using the ‘Pages to Watch’ feature.
Reason #4: Social media can help boost your brand image
Social media platforms are natural places to reach out to highly targeted potential customers. They help users connect with even those brands that are new and unknown.
60% of the Instagrammers have claimed to have discovered new products on social media.
Here is an example that will help you understand why is social media important for business:
Absolut Vodka came up with an illuminated ‘Spark’ bottle for their popular drink and raised awareness about it through Instagram. Through short video clips they highlighted the bottle and encouraged the trendy crowd to ‘spark up’ their nights. The Instagram campaign that was launched on the Labor Day Weekend managed to achieve a 5 point lift in brand awareness.
Reason #5: Social media helps increase your website traffic
The best way to drive traffic to your website is through social media posts and ads. Social channels make it possible to share the great content that you publish on your blog or website, with your readers.
Here are a few things you can do to make sure your website gets more visits:
Make sure you include your website link within the first 200 to 250 characters of your post content.
To give you an idea how it works, here are two posts. One of these posts was published on June 7th 2018. It exceeds 250 characters in length. The second post was published on June 8th 2018 and is well within the 250 character limit.
Now you might think that the post dated June 7th 2018 might be longer since it has more than 250 characters. But it is not so. In fact the image size of the June 7th post is smaller than the June 8th post.
Also, there was exceptional difference in the number of visits when we checked out the visits status in Google Analytics.
The number of visits that the post of 8th June received was 8 times more than the one that the June 7th post received. The image below should give you the details:
Participate in Social chats (such as the weekly #HootChat on Twitter)
These tactics help you capture the attention of more and more new users and make them visit your website. You can increase your visibility and enjoy more benefits of social media for business.
Here are a few points you need to keep in mind:
· Offer value to your users on chat instead of coming across as promotional
· Include your website address in all your social media profiles
· If there is a particular landing page on your website which is relevant to the chat, make sure you pin the post and highlight the same.
Reason #6: Social media helps you speed up your customer service
Gone are the days when people had to mail in their dissatisfaction of a product or a service to submit complaints. The strongly worded letters have long since been replaced by short but aggressive and rash tweets, directly targeted at the company.
67% consumers prefer social media for customer service. By making response automators and real humans answer queries, many companies have started offering speedy customer service through social media.
You need to be extremely careful if you are applying automated response to your social media account. Even the biggest of the brands have had to apologize on account of their bad response.
This is how you can make social media speed up your customer service:
· Address negative complaints promptly, apologize publicly and take the corrective action at the earliest. Let the world know the consequence of such action.
· Acknowledge positive comments or compliments, thank the commenters and recommend products or services that they may like.
· Make it all about your customers and let them know that you care.
Reason #7: It allows you to boost your brand loyalty
If you are still wondering why invest in social media marketing, here is why you should — to improve brand loyalty.
With a strategic social media plan and the right social media tools you can influence your consumers to be loyal to your brand.
As per a study conducted by Convince & Convert,53% Americans who follow brands on social media are more loyal to those brands.
With more and more millennials taking social media by the storm it is high time brands started engaging with them on social media and increased their chances of improving their brand loyalty.
Reason #8: It helps maximize your ROI
Many social media platforms such as Facebook and Pinterest have enabled businesses to integrate their monetized interactions.
You can use them as pop-up stores in order to boost your brand awareness, extend your audience reach, increase your customer conversions, enhance profitability and improve your inbound traffic.
Here are a few ways of maximizing your returns through social media:
· Build a community and keep your audience engaged through creative posts
· Advertise your products or services within the platform. You can link back the ads to your website or your social media page.
· Join conversations on other groups and communities
· Integrate your social media channels along with other channels
Reason #9: Social Media helps in Networking
Most of the business happens through word-of-mouth referrals and in order to get these referrals you will have to network with like-minded people. Online networking sites can work absolutely great when it comes to sharing your knowledge and getting word-of-mouth referrals. However, joining any random networking site will not work for you.
There are a number of things you need to consider and they include:
· Understanding your target audience
· Researching the social networking sites
· Humanizing your interactions with fans and followers
· Creating a consistent appearance across networks
While joining social networks it is important not to spread yourself too thin. Join a couple of them and spread your time effectively on each of those. It is going to take a lot of your time and devotion.
Reason #10: It makes Recruitment easier
There are a few social media sites such as LinkedIn that are dedicated to the job market. You can post your job ads here and attract skilled people to fill in your vacant positions. This can save you a lot of time and money.
Now that you have understood the importance of social media for business it is time to start pushing your interactive messages. Start building upon your community and come up with better ways to engage with your audience. The faster you do this the better will be the ROI of your campaigns.
Done right, social media marketing leads to more customers, increased traffic, and better conversions. Of course it’s here to stay!
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