You may often ask yourself, would social media benefit my business? The answer is simple, yes. Social media proves useful for all businesses regardless of size or industry.
There are many different social platforms that may be beneficial to your business for a multitude of different reasons; different platforms have separate benefits and audiences and not all may be suitable for your business and the type of services you offer. We’re here to help you understand why you should be using social media to market your business.
Big up yourself!
To be able to effectively sell products, gain followers or influence your readers it is important for them to know who you are in the first place.
The best way to build your brands authority is through the frequent use of social media, and with 70% of small and medium sized businesses planning to increase digital marketing budgets, it is clear that this is a popular strategy.
While it is a great idea to use social media for your brands image, it is necessary to invest your time in platforms that are relevant to your business. By finding platforms that support your brands image and taking into consideration the factors of each platform you can easily target your audience:
- Facebook is probably the best platform for promoting any brands image with 78% of UK adults use this. With such a vast user base, you can’t really go wrong with promoting your brand here.
- Instagram and Pinterest are great options for brands who rely heavily on images such as clothing brands and other retailers. These are also useful for targeting young adults.
- LinkedIn is like the Facebook for businesses and business people. It is a great platform for networking and is mainly made up of business related content and is useful for connecting with corporate influencers.
- Twitter is a less formal way of communicating and promoting your brands image. With only a 140-character limit, it is a great way of sending out short and snappy posts. This is also a very effective way of having your customers/clients get in contact with you.
Every piece of content you share should support your brands image. Set your tone and personality and stick to it and you will be well on your way to having a strong brand image.
Helps you engage with your audience
By being available on social media, it makes you more approachable to your customers and clients. More and more businesses are getting themselves on social media to provide customer service in an instant and informal way.
Posting on social media can be extremely beneficial for your business, not only does this allow your customers to see your company updates but you also gain customer insights. You can see, using different social media analysing tools, patterns in your customers’ behaviour, and use this to tailor future posts. E.g. if your post on how to make a cake had the most engagement, you know that recipe based posts are the most popular and you can use this information when planning your marketing strategy.
An example of a social media analysing tool is Facebook insights. Using this – which comes as standard with every page created on Facebook – you can see which of your posts got the most engagement, what times the posts got the most activity and even what gender/age the post attracted the most.
Boosts your search engine rankings
Just like Google indexes new content that you upload to your website in the form of blogs, new pages etc., Google also uses social media to discover new content. Your SEO can benefit from social media as Google now considers social signals such as Tweets, Facebook posts etc. as a way of getting links to your website.
Google will also rank your website higher if it sees that you are a credible source. Google considers your social media influence; they do this by seeing how you influence your followers to click through to links that fulfil their need.
Keep up with your competitors
It is important to keep up with your competitors in business, and social media is one of – if not THE – best way to do this. Keeping track of your competitors is a great way to gain a new perspective or angle on the way you put out your content.
Keeping an eye on your competitors is also a very useful way of finding out what’s going on in your industry. This opens new doors to new content you could possibly write about with other possible stems of ideas coming out of that.
Finally, by tracking your competitors on social media, you have the advantage of seeing how their customer base responds compared to your own, and what posts your competitors are getting the most interaction on. There is also a tool to help you do this using Facebook insights! You are able to create a list of your competitors’ pages, and Facebook will automatically help you monitor their performance statistics.
To summarise…
Social media is a vital part of your businesses growth. Without these platforms to reach your customers and let your customers see your brands personality, it would be much more difficult to raise your brands profile.
