Let us start with an important piece of information: Businesses require social media presence. There is absolutely no debate about that. There are more than 3.5 Billion people around the world using social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. That is literally a little less than half the world’s population! This is no passing trend or fad. The concept of social media is going to exist in various forms for a considerably long time and is worth investing time and energy on. That being said, let’s move on to a few benefits for a business to have a social media presence.
1. Build brand awareness at an affordable cost
The best way to reach out to a significantly large part of your target audience is through social media. For SME’s, to begin with, it’s an excellent way to show people that you exist. It is a cost-efficient method to bring awareness about your brand and your product or service. Even passive users visit social media at least once a day. This gives an opportunity to promote new content to your target population and followers every 8 hours or so. At 1/10th the cost, of say print media or television ads, social media provide a multitude of options for SME’s to customize their ads and content, all from the comfort of their own office.
2. Increase sales to your business while understanding customer interests
As people can visualize your product and service, you build brand awareness and credibility. This offers them an easy way to show their intent to purchase from you. In such cases, having an option to buy directly from your site is the way to go. Linking all your social media accounts to each other and to your website is critical. Potential customers, casually browsing with little interest to buy, have a much greater chance of purchasing if they have access to more web content across the different platforms and access to your website. The cost to acquire such customers is incredibly lower than through traditional methods. It also helps understand your customers. By reading their tweets or comments on posts, you can insights into their daily lives and behavioral patterns. This directly helps with marketing efforts and increases your Return on Investment from product strategies.
3. Get influencers to promote and sell for you
There are also a group of people on these platforms called Influencers. They garner a large following on social media and can draw the attention of their followers to your brand. For a fee, they will post about your product or service. Depending upon the influencer, they will have anywhere between 100,000 to a few million likes for every post. By showcasing your brand through them, you are guaranteeing that at minimum, an awareness to your brand has been created to as many people. This concept is similar to TV ads using a popular celebrity to promote their product. However, it is interesting to note that research from Nielsen, Carat, and YouTube shows that collaborating with an influencer can give your brand four times more lift in brand familiarity than collaborating with a celebrity.
4. Much likelier chance to go viral!
On the off chance that your business posts something ‘attention-grabbing’, you also have a chance to go viral. As people start liking, commenting on, and sharing your social posts, your content is visible to new audiences—their friends and followers. As people now start posting about you, they share to their followers and as your post spreads like wildfire across the internet, getting thousands or even millions of shares and your brand visibility increases extraordinarily. Albeit the chances to get a post to go viral are actually slim, having no social media accounts reduces that chance to zero.
5. Boost your SEO organically
Did you know that using social media actually boosts your websites SEO? Search engines such as Google, Bing, etc. know exactly which pages are consistently earning traffic and which are being ignored. Driving traffic to those pages through your social media platforms will cause them to move up the SEO ladder fast. Responding to comments or tweets regularly will show customers that as a business, you care about your followers and this will encourage people to visit your website. When you are building a connection and a rapport, you’re taking the time to provide your followers with useful information, help and entertainment, without asking for anything in return. In a competitive market, this can make a huge difference between customers choosing your brand over your competitors’.
6. Keep track of your competition
Social media is an efficient way to reach out to customers and maintain a brand image and everyone is leveraging it to their advantage. It gives you an opportunity to keep track of your competitors and see what they are up to. This can be helpful in planning your own social media strategies; the kind of service or product you should be promoting next or content to upload. Keeping an eye on competitors also help you understand their line of thought and how they are approaching customer strategy. Remember that if you can spy on them, they are probably spying on you as well.
These are some of the most straightforward reasons on why you should be online to begin with. Social media as a concept provides tonnes of added benefits to businesses. Every day, experts find new ways to sell products, connect with customers and promote your brand through social media that is up for grabs to be used effectively. People are looking at your avatar every day, which is most likely brand mascot, logo or anything which describes your company, and it embeds into them. They are more likely to remember you as a brand that sells a particular product or your service over your competitors’ brand. If you are an SME and are worried that it is going to cost you significantly to get your social media platforms up and running, not to worry – there are several social media tools which support various social media networks, and allow you to manage everything from one page.
You can start using social media by creating a website for your business, and/or by using various social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube, etc.
Go ahead, start clicking and engaging. It’s that Simple!