When it comes to using social media for business, the most important advantage is being able to easily connect with your audience. You can raise awareness of your products and/or services, be interactive with your audience through questions and competitions and support users with any queries they have in a fast and effective manner – raising brand loyalty.
Increasing Recommendations
Did you know, 71% of consumers who have a good social media experience with a brand are likely to recommend it to others?
Now, imagine that experience is with your competitor, you could potentially lose a consumer from that recommendation. Especially since 84% of consumers either completely or somewhat trust recommendations from family, colleagues, and friends about products and services.
Driving Traffic to Your Website
Particularly great for start-ups and SMEs, social media is a great tool for increasing traffic to your website. Facebook even allows you to share your links into free-to-join groups, gaining even more exposure for your posts. Although Twitter may not have this option, it is massive on hashtags. The use of these can help reach users outside of your follower count.
With 2.46 billion social media users worldwide in 2017 alone, the potential is too great to ignore.
Relationship Building
Increasing brand loyalty is one of the biggest reasons companies use social media. Connecting with consumers through the messaging options on each social platform feels like a more personal experience for the customer, rather than the typical email with three-day response time.
Having this relationship increases the possibility of continued sales to the customer, but most importantly makes them feel as though they are important to you – which they should be!
Not only that, the built-in analytic tools which can be seen on the majority of social media platforms allow you to understand your target audience more and tailor future campaigns to see a better ROI.
Keeping Your Audience up-to-date
Your audience won’t check your website every day for updates. Similarly, they won’t check every email for the latest offers and insights. The average email open-rate was 24.79% in 2017 for SMEs. In 2018, email open rates across industries were averaging at 18.1%, according to the DMA’s Email benchmarking report 2018.
People use social media every day, spending an average of 135 minutes on the platforms each day. This gives you a great opportunity to post any updates or offers that you may have.
Inexpensive Advertising
Why spend hundreds or thousands on print advertising or TV? The good old days of TV advertising are coming to an end. More people are spending their advertising budget online rather than using it for more traditional methods.
Social media is an inexpensive option for advertising, using a pay-per-click (PPC) approach. This means that if your advert isn’t clicked on, you don’t pay. The pricing is usually around £0.30-£0.70. Another option is paying per (x) amount of impressions, usually 1000.
On the other hand, if you were to use print advertising, you would be paying for each leaflet or brochure printed, rather than how many people actually read it and take action. You could hand out 100 leaflets and not guarantee that your audience will action any of your CTAs.
Will You Be Joining the Social Media World?
The most popular platforms for business are Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Each of these, including others, are free to join for business accounts as well as personal.
Ensuring a frequently updated social media page and quick response time to enquiries can be time-consuming. Although, the benefits completely outweigh this.
Would like to start using social media for your business, but lack the time or resource to do so? Why not consider hiring a Digital Marketing Apprentice? 75% of employers in the UK reported that hiring an apprentice improved the quality of their product or service. Find out more here.
