Benefits of Social Media Presence for Your Business
Nowadays, social media are no longer solely used for communication purposes: we use them to search for the latest news and uncover new brands, find more information and even purchase the products or services we like! From their early appearance in 1997 and till the present, many of these platforms have already become an integral part of our daily routines.
Needless to say, the number of social media users is also increasing steadily. According to Statista, over 3.6 billion people today use social media on a daily basis, and by 2025, nearly 810 million users across the world will have an income. This means that nearly every second person in the world will be actively using social media – and that’s why it has become a perfect tool for targeting large audiences for marketers and, of course, businesses!
In this article, we’re going to explain why social presence is important for different enterprises and how their owners can today use social media platforms to enhance their business growth.
10 Major Benefits of Social Media Presence for Any Business
Of course, before implementing any marketing strategy, it is important to figure out whether or not it is worth it: the more advantages it can provide for your business, the better. As for developing the online presence on social media, it features tons of appealing advantages for basically any business, regardless of its size and the field it operates in.
Let’s now talk about the basic benefits of social media you can get for your business today.
#1 Build the Brand Awareness
Brand awareness describes the degree of consumer recognition of a product by its brand name and is considered to be a key step of effective business promotion. In this case, social media platforms can make your business visible online, make more potential customers or clients find you on the Internet, and uncover who you are or what your business is about.
Having a well-made social media account can also help you to enhance brand awareness in an inexpensive and quick way, as it offers a diverse number of tools for effective audience targeting that in turn will bring in sales!
Additionally, brand awareness is one of the long-term goals that any business is continuously working on, as it helps more people to know about you. Naturally, if people are aware of your product and know what your brand stands for, they are more likely to purchase items you produced. So, the more efforts are invested into developing a powerful social media strategy, the better.
#2 Win More Authority Among Community
In most cases, when a person discovers any business, they will always try to search for it on the Internet to find out what the business is all about: its location, website, reviews, and, of course, its social media platforms. For this reason, any of your accounts should provide all the essential information about what you’re doing, as well as provide compelling arguments on how your products can help the searcher.
The most recent marketing statistics show that 65% of consumers will feel much more connected to the brands that have a robust presence on social media. In other words, without an active social presence, the chances that your potential customers will want to buy your products or services are getting much lower.
Still uncertain about that? Analyze the behavior of your inner circle, or even yourself!
Social media platforms can help your business to build authority by making it more accessible for online users, yet showing that it is really trustworthy and approachable.
#3 Get Authenticity
The next essential thing you’ll surely want to make use of for your business is to explain to your potential clients why your brand is better compared to its competitors on the market by showing its authenticity. Among the millions of similar businesses offering their products or services online, your business must stand out of the crowd and get noticed by a large audience.
When it might be challenging to show the brand personality through the standard websites, with a social media account, you’ll get much more freedom for expressing the unique features of your business, why it is better and how it can benefit your clients or consumers. Followers will surely expect to see what’s going on beyond the scenes of your website and connect with you on a more personal level. After all, nearly 73% of consumers prefer brands that personalize the shopping experience!
Thus, making catching stories on Instagram about the new product releases, setting up live interviews with your team on Facebook, and even posting some short & useful videos on YouTube can significantly improve the brand authenticity, yet make your audience, followers, and customers a few steps closer to understanding your brand value.
#4 Enhance the Audience Engagement
Even the ideally planned social campaign will become inefficient if not considering your target audiences, their preferences, pains, and needs in particular. Since every social media platform is designed to meet the users’ needs, and not the businesses, understanding your audience is one of the major priorities any business should focus on. According to HubSpot, 3 out of 4 customers expect companies to understand their needs, and they’re ready to pay up to 17% more for a good experience.
Social media is a perfect tool that will help your business target the right audiences, as well as benefit them by creating new, engaging ways to reach out to people. Using different tools like stories, reels, shorts or live streaming can be a great chance for your audience to get interested in your business, make them feel more welcome and motivated to interact with your brand.
Additionally, by creating and experimenting with the content, you can also learn your audience better: you can create different polls or ask the questions to get some fresh ideas for your brand, find out some good ways to improve your products or services, research the interests of your customers and, finally, define the most effective methods to interact with your audience.
#5 Provide a Great Support
Probably, anybody of us has at least one bad experience with a certain product or service and needed to wait for hours on a helpline to get it resolved. Even if you were lucky enough to find the help, ask yourself: Would I like to use this product/service again? In most cases, the answer is no.
However, troubleshooting any problem becomes much easier with the use of social media channels! All you need to do is to provide access to your support team, so that your customers could always get the help online, exactly at the moment they need it. Not only supporting your clients in social situations is easier, but also much quicker compared to the standard calls – it will take no longer than a few minutes for the customers to describe the problem they’re experiencing and they’ll immediately get answered by your support representatives.
For those who want to develop their business on the Internet, building this level of trust is not an option, but the necessity that can enhance customer loyalty and encourage the delighted clients to share their experience and recommend your brand to others.
#6 Grow Affordably
Regardless of the common stereotype that any marketing effort will cost you a lot, social media is a perfect in-budget option for any business, as it features one of the highest ROIs. This means that with a well-planned marketing campaign created specifically for your brand development, you’ll start getting the results immediately. Of course, it doesn’t mean you’ll get several thousands of active followers over the night, but the right strategy can surely speed up your business growth.
Moreover, you can also use social as an effective tool for generating more traffic for your website and building better domain authority for search engines. Even a simple sharing of catching content from your website can generate more high-quality leads, which in turn helps to create ad revenue and enhance sales performance.
#7 Promote the Brand
Also, none of the businesses today can survive without the marketing campaigns targeted at the brand and its product promotions. Along with making some efforts to market the specific products on your official business account, social media can also provide lots of different partnership opportunities and collaborations with other brands, celebrities, and influencers, making many more people hear of you and your business and encourage them to try the products or services you offer.
What is more, selecting the influencers with the right audience that can surely get interested in your brand, can significantly increase the chances of turning your one-time buyers into loyal clients.
#8 Understand the Marketplace
Once you’ve set up a few sales funnels for your business, you’ll probably start asking yourself: How to make them generate more revenue? And the key aspect that will help you to enhance the product performance is learning more about your customers.
With a business account on social media, you’ll get the additional data source that will help you to define your target persona, understand their demographics, preferences, how they’re interacting with your accounts and why they find your brand interesting to them. This data is exceptionally important for creating a more targeted, personalized strategy to better communicate with your audience, connect with them and improve the experience from interaction with your brand.
#9 Stay Competitive
Whatever industry your business refers to, we’re more than sure it has at least a dozen competitors on the market, so it’s not just enough to make good products today – you need to make them the best ones for your potential customers. This also means that before making the purchase decision, your audience has the options to compare your products with and, pretty often, even if the products are great, they’re still likely to lose the competition without the additional marketing approaches covered.
However, it’s much easier to compel the clients to give your brand a try with the properly planned marketing calls on different channels, including the most powerful – social. By creating engaging content for our audience, like catching infographics and useful video guides, tutorials, and testimonials, you’ll provide the potential customers with appealing arguments on why your product is better. Luckily, creating top-notch media content is now easier than ever before with powerful photo and video editing tools. What is more, with the file formatting tools like Movavi video converter, you can freely post the content created right to the different social media platforms you use: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, or else publish it on your official business website!
#10 Increase the Online Traffic
Last but not least, the advantage of the social media presence for a business is generating much more traffic for your website. By sharing your content on social accounts, you’re giving your users some more reasons to click-through to your website and purchase the products, if they’re relevant to their queries. The more quality content you’ll share on social media, the more likely your traffic leads to conversion opportunities.
Along with that, there are multiple approaches to enhance your business ranking online, from the simple use of hashtags to more advanced SEO tactics. However, you should also keep in mind that social media accounts can add more authority to your domain and send out a brand signal to search engines that your brand is worth trusting, yet is the most relevant option that searchers – your potential customers – are looking for.
How to Choose the Social Platforms Your Business Should Develop On
Among hundreds of different platforms used today, it’s better to focus on two essential questions when choosing the social media channels for your business:
- How popular is it? (You don’t want to invest the efforts into the network no one cares about)
- Is it relevant for your buyer persona? (The common problem of most businesses that have only started developing their business in social platforms is that they select the platforms that are not used by their target audiences. Thus, even with the perfectly made business account, they’re still seeing the low brand performance)
Each social platform contains various demographics, with each of those having different pains and needs, so the first thing you should learn is what channels are the most popular among your audiences, and prioritize them accordingly. Additionally, professional marketers recommend starting with no more than 1-2 accounts in different networks for a business: remember, it takes a lot of time to create unique, high-quality, and engaging content for social accounts. So, it’s better to start developing one channel instead of taking too many tasks at a time and failing with them all. And, if you have some more time and willingness – you can always create more!
To simplify the process a bit, you can look at the famous brands or competitors within the area you’re working in. As a rule, the most common social media channels the brands use are:
- TikTok
- YouTube
Whatever social platform you’ve selected, make sure to post the content consistently to provide distinct results for your brand and business and always stay in touch with the community.
How to Successfully Develop the Social Media Presence for a Business?
Now that we know what makes social media appealing for businesses today and how to find the most effective channel for your enterprise, it’s time to uncover how to get started building a presence on social networks. Below you’ll find some of the most important practices that will surely come in handy.
#1 Set Up the S.M.A.R.T. Goals
This concept has been used in different industries over years, but in fact, still remains one of the most useful tactics to successful strategic planning. For instance, if you focus on the following goal for social media presence development, a good example to analyze will be:
“Increasing the Instagram Stories impressions by 30% till 2023”
To ensure this goal is SMART, you can check whether it is:
- Specific – Targeted on a specific channel (Instagram) and metric (impressions)
- Measurable – The impressions are visible right in the stories analytics data
- Achievable – You won’t be able to achieve 100% of impressions, and set up the realistic goal for your business account
- Relevant – Instagram has the most active audience that can interact with your brand, which makes this platform relevant for your business
- Time-bound – You give yourself enough time to complete the goal – by the end of 2023.
These simple but effective criteria will help you to set up the concrete purposes and easily achieve them on your way to developing the online presence on social platforms.
#2 Learn Everything About Your Audience
The other method that will help you to achieve your goals in social media is to learn your target audience. As a business owner, you’ve probably known your personal buyer and can more or less understand their preferences, pains, and needs. This information will also help target your audience on social media!
Overall, the most essential aspects to consider when eliminating the right audience persona are:
- Their age and gender
- Education, occupation, income levels
- Geolocation
- Interests, aspirations
- Other brands they love
- The devices they prefer
Making detailed research regarding the potential audiences will help you to understand how to better target and interact with them. Additionally, this can save up lots of money for choosing the best approaches for interactions and using the marketing costs more efficiently.
#3 Interact With Your Audience
As you know, the follower count today is a vanity metric: even with having thousands following your brand account, you can still have only a dozen of them really interested in it. That is why the trend of collecting subscribers is finally over (for the brands that do care about the connection with their audiences).
Instead of this, try building up relationships with your followers: answer the questions, mention people you reference in social media posts or stories, always try to reply to the followers asking about some additional information and those having troubles related to your brand or its products – this is not only a great way to get closer with your audience but also understand your audience better!
#4 Run a Content Calendar
Another essential aspect you cannot overlook is the content you’re sharing on social networks. Apart from making your content valuable, EATable and interesting, you should post it consistently as well. Even the most catching content can get lost in your audiences’ feeds, not to mention if that’s the only post you’ve done in a month!
Keeping your content scheduled can help you ensure you’ll always have something new to offer to your followers and the new users that come across your business profile. Also, mind the content type you’re doing for a specific platform: the long reads you’ve done for Facebook or LinkedIn will be probably ignored on Instagram, and impossible to read on Twitter. Also, by properly timing the posts, you can greatly maximize the engagement and always have some great content to offer for your audience.
#5 Focus on Being Helpful
The common mistake that most businesses make while developing their social media presence is doing each of their posts to marketing, and that’s the major reason for low audience engagement. Regardless of how awesome your proposal may sound, remember that each platform already features tons of different ad posts. Once the clients notice they’re getting overwhelmed with the proposals they see on the screen – they will more than likely tap “unsubscribe” and never return.
Instead, try to provide value and usefulness instead of the “hard selling” only, combine the different types of posts, or make them more interesting to review. If your followers ask about a certain question – respond to them in a timely manner, if they experience any problems concerning your business or service – always do your best to reach them out and resolve the issue. These simple rules will not only help you to get more active followers but also generate lifelong customers that will regularly convert.
#6 Use More Media Content
Today, in the information era, people are tired of tons of different information targeting them once they unlock their smartphones. For this reason, it’s not the best idea to focus on content writing solely – according to the different sources, every post has only six seconds to capture a user’s attention and make them read it to the end. By adding the catching media content to your posts (especially those targeted specifically on images or videos, such as Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube), you can significantly increase the chances of your brand being noticed.
Conclusion
Social media presence has become one of the most essential factors of developing any business on the Internet, and in this article, we’ve proved it completely. Regardless of the size and field your business operates in, it can become one of the most effective boosters that will enhance your brand awareness, increase audience engagement and, finally, increase sales.
With the strong social presence strategy that is targeted specifically for your business, you’ll be more than sure to start benefiting straight from day one. So, if you’re waiting for the right moment to get started, here it comes!
Start developing your business presence online today and get ready to see the impressive results right away!