Social media is increasingly becoming invincible part of business strategy. Whether marketing yourself as a professional or marketing for your business or whether want to make your online presence noticeable in search engines ranks, you need social media for all these. At present, 78% of companies have dedicated teams for their social media campaign. The reason behind this huge interest in social media marketing is simply the increasing dependence of consumers on social media comments for their buying decisions. As per the latest study, around 61% of consumers expressed their reliance on customer reviews before making a purchasing decision.
But the huge importance of social media for business understood too well by majority of professionals and businesses, still there are many businesses that are confused about their social media activities or posts. A whopping 71% of consumers said that they consider social media important for promotions, another 66% said to receive updates on new products or services. Around 50% of all consumers prefer to connect with brands on social platforms for customer service requirements.
Why businesses need social media?
While big businesses are already keen on tapping the opportunity of social media, there are too many small businesses that still remain in darkness concerning the effectiveness of these platforms for their business endeavors. Surely, without social media presence these businesses are missing a great opportunity. Let us offer some important reasons as to explain why give importance to social media.
A place to gain market insights:
We all know that on social media people share almost everything on their lives, preferences and tidbits. Naturally, from a business perspective this opens a huge opportunity to gain market insights. Moreover, with the use of robust social media tools (many of them are free) the businesses can further catch this opportunity.
Get free exposure for business:
As a business owner it is important to connect more number of people and let people know about your business and particular offers and announcements from time to time. Social media is a great free tool to connect your customers and connect new people and let them know about your business and products. Moreover, there are plenty of marketing tools in every platform for promotion, creating buzz around events and making people hear about important updates on your business. It is the place to get wide exposure as much as you want.
Making personal connection with your customers:
Many businesses typically do not have much opportunity to know their customers from close and hence they miss the typical personal touches that make customers more loyal to the brand. You can just make this personal connection with customers through social media. In social media customers generally follow the businesses that they are loyal to or prefer. Thus, even for bridging the gap between the business and the customer also having a social media presence is important.
How to begin with a social media presence for your business?
There are plenty of social media platforms and many of them bear the tags like “hottest,” “coolest”, “latest” etc. But as a business what social platform you need and what you need to aim at? These are vital questions to ask.
Do extensive research: Using social media like traditional media is likely to fail making a difference to your business. So, make sure to know all the tools and how to use them to reap maximum benefits from the platform.
Ensure throughout presence: Scheduled posts from time to time is not the way to engage people with your business. So, regular and repeated presence, posts, contextual replies and buzzes are necessary to make lively connection with customers and peer.
Continue adding value: Knowing how your posts add value to the users is important. Follow a consistent and clear strategy of making posts that offer value to the users. Just do not make posts like a ritual that does not create any real value.
Clarify the objectives, Do’s and Don’ts to your team: If you have a rigorous social media presence and have employed a team of professionals, make sure they know the short term and long term objectives and strategy for your social media activities. Clearly clarify the do’s and don’ts as a small mistake can bring disrepute for your company.
How to approach social media strategy for business?
There are plenty of social platforms but you need to have a clear strategy and that begins with choosing the right platforms and accordingly devising strategy for each platform.
Facebook: Hardly can you find someone who is not on Facebook and so it is a great platform for targeting a general audience or to find and connect potential people. Moreover, Facebook offers some interesting tools for advertising or paid promotion of your page to build exposure for your business.
Twitter: Twitter as the leading social sharing tool garners business importance and to make yourself heard the posts here need relevancy, personality and brevity. Moreover, frequency of hashtag enabled posts is a key factor in creating a buzz around the posts.
Instagram: Instagram is an image based social platform that can be ideal for businesses that can convey message through visuals.
Pinterest: This is also another great image based social media that can work wonder to drive traffic to your business website. Frequent pinning and re-pinning of the image contents is important to stay relevant and live for a given search term.
LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a social media for connecting businesses and professionals with other businesses and professionals. This platform is effective to get involved with larger business community and professionals.
Google+: Google+ as a social media is important to drive SEO campaign with content rich posts and for promoting blogs or simply for driving web traffic to business website. Just like Google search engine keywords and SEO aspects play an important role here.
Benefits of social media for business
There is a wide range of benefits with a regular, consistent and rigorous social media presence. Let us have a look at the key benefits of social media for business.
- Social media is a round the clock campaigner for your business.
- For small businesses, social media is a great tool for building credibility as compared to large companies.
- Experience of users or buyers or review of customers influence more people to shape their opinion on products and brands. So, by gaining reputation simply through product quality and then by getting good reviews, a small business can get impetus of growth from social media.
- Social media can make your product or offering go viral in quick time just if it is found interesting by large number of people and shared extensively.
