10 Reasons You Should Not Ignore Social Media in Your Business
Too many smaller businesses neglect their social media presence! Or, they simply post a few pictures once in a while. Perhaps they just use one social media platform and neglect other avenues.
For a lot of businesses, the effort required to maintain a good social media profile doesn’t make sense – they are either unaware of the potential of social media, or they are struggling to utilise the full potential of social media due to not dedicating the resources to keep up with it.
To help you understand why social media is so important here are our favourite 10 reason you should not ignore the potential of social media in your business.
1. You Can Gain Valuable Customer Insights
Social media platforms generate a huge amount of data about your market place.
Every day there are over 500 million Tweets, 4.5 billion Likes on Facebook, and 95 million photos and videos uploaded to Instagram. Let alone the impact that TikTok is having for businesses!
Social media platforms track and analyse massive amounts of data on who and how people are using their platforms. This translates into huge amounts of information about the demographics of your ideal customer – who they are, what they like, what their online buying habits are, and how they feel about your brand and brands like yours.
The art of “social listening” by engaging in your primary social media every day allows you to gather the customer information required to make smarter business decisions.
There are many software platforms out there that can help you analyse the data, and you can translate the information into actionable tasks and usable bites of information.
2. Websites are important, but social media can really get your branding out there!
Your social media presence can make it much easier for your customers to find you and connect with you. Here’s the catch – great social media does require this connection with your customer. That means actually engaging with them! In this day and age, customer service is primary, and social media can become your frontline customer service and support line.
Taking a responsible approach to your online reputation can make your brand shine above all the others!
This type of real connection will encourage you customer retention and brand loyalty. Research shows that most people who follow a brand on social media are more loyal to those brands.
Bare in mind that social media should be leading your customers to your website where you would have your site set up for conversions. Never rely on social media alone for your business!
3. Advertising on social platforms generates highly targeted ads.
Social media paid advertising is less expensive than almost all other forms of advertising, and you can begin with a very small budget. The targeting options in social media are very powerful in allowing you to reach just the right audience.
You can segment your audience by location, company, gender, age, interests, and shopping habits and a whole lot more! Tracking of you results is also very easy. As you monitor results you can adapt you future ads by that feedback, making your campaigns even more effective.
4. Social media marketing can help generate higher converting leads
Social media increases sales and customer retention through regular interaction and timely customer service.
World-class companies rate social media as the most effective way to identify customer trends, key decision makers, and new business opportunities.
Additionally these companies list their social media activities as being responsible for continual increases in customer engagement, loyalty and lead generation. If social media is this important for large companies, imagine just how essential it is for smaller, local businesses. If you rely on repeat sales from you more immediate community, you should be paying a great deal of attention to you social media and online reputation!
5. Social media can provide a much richer customer experience
If you aren’t on social media, most of your customers expect you to be! Over 67 percent of consumers now go to social media for customer service. They expect fast response times and 24/7 support – and companies that deliver win out.
Most of the studies into social media indicate that companies who use social media for customer support see much bigger gains than those who don’t.
6. Social media is extremely important in increasing website traffic and search ranking
One of the biggest benefits of social media for business is using it to increase your website traffic.
Not only does social media help you direct people to your website, but the more social media shares you receive, the higher your search ranking will be.
7. Find out what your competitors are doing
Smart businesses use many tools to monitor their competitors activities, such as how much they are spending on their online advertising, what keywords they target on their website, and the demographics of their social media audiences and social media ad targeting!
This kind of intel will allow you to make strategic business decisions to stay ahead of them. For example, you can identify gaps or weaknesses in their campaigns that we can exploit, or you can piggy back on some of their work and ad spend!
Of course, this kind of “spying”, or intel gathering, is a bit of an advanced strategy!
8. Social media networks allow you to share content faster and easier
It wasn’t always as easy as it is today to get information out to your current customers! Social media makes reaching your customers with new offers, new ideas, new solutions very fast, economical and simple!
All you need to do is share your content on the social media of your choice. Of course you should have automated multiple sharing set up so that one post automatically generates across all of your social platforms, and that content is reposted at regular intervals.
Platforms rarely show your posts to all of your followers at once, so reposting is required. You should not be doing that manually!
9. Social media platforms can allow specific geotargeted content
Geo-targeting is an effective way to send your message out to a specific audience based on their location. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter have tools that allow you to communicate the right kind of content to the right segment of your audience for that content.
10. Use social media to build relationships
One of the main ingredients to a successful social media presence is the ability to create and maintain relationships! Discussion should not just be one way on social platforms – you should respond to comments, and criticisms!
Don’t just blast your social media with sales pitches. Ask questions, run surveys and competitions, ask for feedback. Most importantly, promptly respond to questions, comments and feedback from your audience! A grumpy person can so easily be turned around if you will just give them the time of day and listen. When this is done publicly on social media the respect you gain from your loyal followers is huge!
Don’t worry about getting attacked by trolls – when you handle genuine complaints and criticisms with respect, your followers will do the troll calling out for you!
Discussions and advice can be given via the social platform as well. For example, someone renting your car might ask for suggestions for somewhere nice for dinner – your responses build the relationship. It is a type of relationship that traditional advertising cannot achieve!
That’s our top ten reasons to utilise social media in your business!