If you want to gain from the benefits of Social Media in modern conditions running just a website or blog is not enough!
Especially, for full-fledged and effective implementation of a business in the online space. Business promotion in social networks also plays an important role.
Social media is omnipresent, powerful, and is unavoidable. Indeed, it is here for a long haul! According to Oberlo, here are some recent statistics:
- There are almost 3.5 billion social media users all around the globe.
- Till now, Facebook is the only leading social media platform.
- 48.2% of Baby Boomers, 77.5% of Generation X, and 90.4% of Millenials are active users of social media.
- Usually, users employ approximately three hours every day on messaging and social networks.
- 73% of marketers think that social media marketing is very effective or somewhat effective for the business if it’s done by the social media marketing agency or experts.
- For researching the products, almost 54% of the social browsers leverage social media.
- There are 71% of the customers with a positive experience of the brand on social media that prefers to brand to the family and friends.
- 49% of the customers rely on the influencer’s advice on social media.
- There are 500 million daily active Instagram stories uploaded globally.
- 91% of social media users access social channels from mobile devices.
Because social media is involved more and more in our lives, it offers endless possibilities for businesses who like to get users via social media marketing.
Social networks have a number of advantages over other online marketing tools (search engine optimization, contextual and banner advertising), and over traditional advertising tools (television and outdoor advertising, BTL, product placement). Let’s take a closer look at these benefits:
1. Humanization Of The Brand
Everyone these days, does not trust the brands until they see some evidence from them that the brands are delivering on their promises.
In order to connect with repeat and potential customers, you need to show the human side of your brand. How do you rate your brand values? Do you have brand values? How do you look at the interests of your clients and employees? Does your product really work?
The ability to create real human connections is one of the key benefits of social media for businesses.
2. Increase Traffic To Your Website
Social media posts and ads are key ways to drive traffic to your website. Publishing content from your blog or website to your social channels is a great way to gain new readers.
Participating in social chat rooms can also be a great way to increase your visibility, attract new customers, showcase your knowledge, and drive traffic to your website.
Offer more value in chat instead of one ad. Just make sure that your website address is included in all of your social media profiles so that people who want to know more about you can do it in one click.
3. Increase Your Sales
No matter what you sell, social media can help you sell just about any product. Social media is an important part of your sales funnel; the process by which a prospect becomes a repeat customer.
As the number of people using social media continues to grow and social selling tools develop, social media are becoming more and more important tools for product search and E-commerce.
4. Reputation Management
Your customers are already talking about you on social media, whether you want to or not. If you use social media, then you can post important messages about your brand and quickly respond to negative messages and comments.
5. Interaction With Customers And Audience
Social networks provide an opportunity to interact directly with customers and subscribers. Unlike traditional media that only offer one-way communication, social media is a two-way street.
6. Targeting
Perhaps the key advantage of social networks is the maximum opportunities for audience targeting ie. focusing an advertising campaign on a specific target audience segment. In fact, you can focus your campaign as deeply as you see fit.
Users have already registered on social networks themselves and reported a maximum of information about themselves: age, place of residence, marital status, education, profession, hobbies, and many other facts. As a result, you have significantly more information than in the case of other marketing tools, and this makes it possible to work only with those users who best match your idea of the target audience.
7. Non-Advertising Format
The modern business owner is overloaded with advertising. The social media falls on from TV, from the pages of print media, from billboards and posters in transport. The Internet is one of the most aggressive media in terms of advertising. As a result, the human brain gradually develops special anti-advertising filters.
In Internet display advertising there is even the term “banner blindness”. This is when a person visits a website and his brain blocks the perception of certain parts of the page because banners are usually placed there. As a result, all of this affects the effectiveness of advertising.
In the case of social networks, anti-ad filters are not included. The fact is that SMM does not use an advertising format. The main mechanism of interaction is communication on topics that are relevant to the user and the distribution of content that is interesting to them.
Naturally, both communication and content contain a mandatory promotional link, but at the same time, unlike advertising, they are valuable to the user.
8. Word Of Mouth
Users tend to share information of interest to their social media platforms. With the right approach, this feature can be used to disseminate information as widely as possible.
It is on this mechanism that the so-called viral marketing is built – the creation of brand-related news feeds, content, interactive applications that users themselves distribute in their environment. Among the most commonly used viral formats are videos, Infographics, viral websites, etc.
There are two main approaches to the social media word of mouth principle:
- The first approach is cross-disciplinary distribution: a user sends targeted information about a product or a link to related content (which is more common) to one or more people in the environment.
- The second approach is social distribution: the user, using the built-in mechanisms of social networks, shares the content being liked to the entire audience. This approach is more effective from a marketing point of view since it allows you to reach a much wider audience.
In the case of viral marketing, users generally distribute information on their own. The task of the marketer, in this case, is to identify the interests of the audience, understand the behavioral motives for the dissemination of information, and form viral content based on this.
9. Attract New Customers And Increase Sales
There are special services to search for potential customers in social networks – they analyze the audience and group users according to the specified parameters. You can set up ads for this audience and advertise the company’s products/services.
Before starting to work with services, it is critical to answer these basic questions:
- Who is your customer?
- Where do they live?
- How old is he or she?
- What is education?
- What do they do?
- How much money do they make a month?
- Are you married or not?
- Are there any children? Dependent relatives?
- Is there a hobby and what?
- When do they need your product or service?
- How important is the product or service to them?
10. Provide Feedback And Support
A brand can communicate with users in different ways – organize contests, hold promotions, communicate in comments, or provide useful information on its products and related products. The more benefit and interest, the higher the loyalty of people to the brand.
People are accustomed to the service and quick resolution of their questions, and if the company meets their expectations, then the likelihood that they will become regular customers of the company increases. Therefore, it is important to quickly respond to comments, maintain a dialogue, admit mistakes if they exist and solve user problems as quickly as possible.
11. Build Brand Awareness
The power of social media for business is publicity. Each published post will be seen by thousands of users, and if the topic is topical – hundreds of thousands. People use social networks as a kind of “Book of Complaints and Suggestions” – any statement, complaint, or praise of the company immediately finds support from users. Every action a company does is a subject for discussion, and the power of public opinion can actually cause considerable damage.
There are always those people who have not heard anything about the company. Social media is correcting this misunderstanding. Each subscriber has their own circle of friends and subscribers. And if they mention a brand in the posts or reposts of a post they liked from the brand page, then their friends will find out about it. And there is a chance that one of them will become a client.
[See related post: 3 Things Instagram Influencers Can Teach You About Building A Large Following ]
12. Search For Employees
Social networks have specialists of various levels in any area of business. It is enough for a company to write a post with a vacancy and it will begin to repost and mention in the comments those who may be suitable for this position.
An additional plus is the increased coverage. You can attract employees not only by direct advertising and publication of vacancies – articles about the company, photos from the office or production help the applicant to form the opinion about the brand and offer the services.
13. Increase Customer Loyalty
What is better than creating brand loyalty for free? Customers interact and follow with their favorite brands. However, what might be fascinating is that 53% of customers who follow the business may be particularly loyal to the business.
There is a clear direct correlation: when customers follow you, they must choose over you and the competitors. In addition, if you improve loyal customers, they will grow your traffic.
14. Promote Your Content
When the content gets promoted then, then the product gets promoted as well. However, do you know the best way to do it? There are many things that you need to take care of; post time, image, and headlines. Everything is essential and should be considered while writing the social media message.
The essential thing to consider in jotting down the message is to be imaginative. You need to be assured that only the creative content is being posted. Telling stories and being imaginative is a productive way of promoting the content. The store can be directed via promotional image or headline and will permit the visitors to create the product perception.
15. Easy A/B Testing for Better Results
A/B testing is when you show several versions of a similar website to different users. Although how to leverage this idea on social media?
Rather than trying other websites, undertake related posts and track the conversion and coverage results of every post. Twitter lately started to make it easier to track the tweets’ results. This will assist you to know the most powerful social media posts.
16. Consider Hashtags To Expand The Reach
Hashtags are a compelling tool to establish a link with many like-minded users by means of social media. It is considered as a simple yet effective manner to improve the reach greatly. The usage of hashtag is free, hence, you can use them easily without worrying about finances. The tweets that have one to two hashtags have almost 55% chances to be retweeted.
It is essential to consider that more hashtags cannot assure more engagement. The over usage of hashtags can devalue the strength of the message and quickly, it can fade away.
You can get the appropriate hashtags with Twitter’s What’s Trending -page. It will reveal the generally considered hashtags and highest-ranking at an appropriate time.
17. Promote Your Cause To Flourish
Consider all those familiar with viral advertising; just take a memory path and find prominent viral campaigns. Social media has a huge impact on making ads spread quickly. This is the shared location for most of the ads.
Not only did it provide a good message; but, also brought a lot of positive advertising. The first ad was broadcast in 2014, although the hashtag they came up with is used even now.
The tag will lead users from their social media timeline to the perpetually brand social media profile, and next to the website. This can be used effectively with the viral ad.
The best thing about the viral ad is that you can experience more attention with little effort relatively and indeed, a better ROI. You must not forget that the focus should not be on driving an ad to go viral.
18. It’s Free – Mostly
It is easy to build social media profiles and publish original content. For any user, this might be sufficient. The content quality can also improve the content itself. But, if the referral wishes to redouble their efforts and encourage further, paying the promotion fee will assist in increasing the exposure.
The business can get promoted on Facebook with any resources. Facebook leads the ad to the users automatically (interested in advertising). Twitter works similarly to Facebook.
You should set up the campaign, and they’ll operate in the budget. It implies that you will experience immeasurable ROI and effectively, you can use the marketing budget.
19. Helps With Link Building
Undeniably, the effect of social media is on Search Engine Optimization indirectly. Consider a case, when you have 1000 shares on the blog post it has powerful content. Most followers who check the post might address the same content and link back to the first post as the source.
The search engines later consider the fact that the content has associated with a good amount. Certainly, this will rank the post more than the competition.
The search engines, such as Bing and Google show the tweets in the search results. This is taken as more suitable for trending projects.
20. Showcase Your Brand Story
Social Media is an outstanding manner for sharing brand stories and its mission. The dynamic stories have a huge influence on the brand’s image. They could be extensive or simple according to the most effective thing.
For instance; Starbucks. It simply reveals the story of someone finding a job at a job fair and definitely improves the public image. It ought to have just one image, however, the story must be powerful and clear.
Wrapping Up
Above we have mentioned the benefits that you can get with social media. In this time period, it is prevalent to leverage social media to the best. Assuredly, you will get beneficial results.
We hope that this article is liked by you. If you have any doubts or suggestions, then, let us know in the comment section below.
Thanks for reading!
[Images – Main Photo by Cleyton Ewerton on Unsplash; Billboards Photo: Flickr/Kris Olin; other images from their respective websites and/or social platforms]
Viviana Folliero works at Awebstar, a social media marketing company in Singapore which is dealing with digital marketing, SEO, mobile app development, logo designing and more.