Social media is growing and intensifying like a wildfire. There is a new app, an app upgrade, or a ravishing social media management tool out in the market almost every other year now. With 4.65 social media users as of April 2022, if you are still missing out on the trends then it is high time to jump on the bandwagon.
If you are a business starting new or have some experience already in the market, It is never too late to start fresh. Once you are on social media as a brand, the big question is:
What are the benefits of social media if you are a business?
To save your time, I have keenly shortlisted the much considered yet profiting benefits from my experience, in-depth research, and of course from a brand perspective.
So without any further ado, let’s dive into the details and make the most of them!!
1. Boost Your Brand Awareness
How you react to a new product in the market explains a lot about how much credibility of the brand matters to us. In previous times, television announcements, flyers, and business cards were used to do the task which required more investment and manpower.
Source: Smart Insights
Among the benefits of social media for a business, a major one is getting a boost in brand awareness without doing much. We tend to trust a brand that we often see to an extent that we end up remembering their logo, brand colors, and even taglines. This is why having a unique brand voice is a must. The more the audience sees you on social media, the more aware they will be of you and the services you offer – leading them to click that one link and convert.
2. Be More Human Than A Brand
Nobody wants to interact with a bot!
In the times of online shopping and purchases, you are most likely to be first found on social media until you are searched about on search engines. As a business, a must-takeaway is to make your target customers trust you. This is why it is important to humanize your brand.
According to Keith Weed (Unilever’s former CMO), “Brand purpose must sit at the core of the brand, driving everything it does….It’s this authenticity that consumers recognize and reward, because today’s consumers, especially Millennials, can smell bullshit a mile away.”
One of the key benefits of social media is the ability to build human connections.
Present your organization, your team, the behind the scene content of a campaign, and much more on your social media to build an emotional connection with your audience.
3. Achieve Your SEO Goals With An Increased Traffic
This one is my favorite out of the two major benefits of social media to me!
Social media has been a game-changer especially for achieving SEO goals. As a business, we all are working on our marketing funnel leading to social media conversions/purchases at the end. Generating traffic for your websites could be done in two ways using social media; in an organic way or via paid ads.
Organic traffic can be achieved by including your website link on every social media bio. Or if you have a great piece of information, you can include your blog’s link with every relevant social media post. Keep your social media posts attractive, and prone to engagement that results in more website clicks.
Source: Statista
Investing a little amount can help you in running relevant ads on social media to a targeted audience with your website links. Ads are great to generate increased traffic to your website, which has the capacity to turn visitors into future customers.
4. Generate New Leads
Just as I mentioned above, social media is a great tool to generate new leads and attract customers from similar niches. Going all out, connecting with new people, and allowing yourself to benefit from the raw feedback can be super helpful for you to grow.
Having a relevant audience is a must need for any business to succeed and social media does this in an easy and low-commitment way for potential customers.
But, how to make this work?
For example, if you are an Instagram influencer then the best possible way to attract a new audience to your Instagram account can be through your quality content.
For this, you can simply have an Instagram scheduler do the task for you at the best times to post on Instagram meanwhile you can focus fully on creating more content.
While everyone is on social media, staying consistent will help you get noticed by a huge new chunk of people. According to Meta, McCarthy & Stone were able to generate an increased number of qualified leads resulting in 4.3X more sales leads compared to the previous year.
5. Attain Customer Satisfaction
For a business, customers always come first and their satisfaction should be the ultimate priority.
Social media gives us an opportunity to directly connect with our customers without compromising their experience. Humanizing the brand allows your customers to trust you and appreciate you knowing that their comments or questions will receive a personalized response right away. Automated messages are off, especially for a consumer going through a rough experience, and getting the much needed attention might help you retain them.
Instagram features like ‘Story Highlights’ play a great role for a business account to share customer responses from direct messages to stories and later save them as highlights on the front view of your account.
The benefits of social media are many yet customers are your brand advocates and showing them public compassion will always be viewed in a positive light by them.
Source: Social Champ
6. Easy On Pocket
Let’s be honest, every penny counts. In the current digital world keeping the same classic marketing methods can be less effective and heavier on the pocket.
Search engine optimization and relevant advertisement can actually help your business to be on top. But nobody will search you until they know you or unless they found you through a targeted ad. Social media is a place where several apps like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and now even TikTok can provide you incomparable visibility to thousands of people online. Consistency, quality content, scheduling content at the best times, and following hot trends are the key benefits of social media with no pressure on the pocket.
For more effective marketing, social media ads can be helpful at nominal prices with controlled parameters.
7. Get Recognised With Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is the new black introduced solely via social media. The concept of ‘influencers’ started when people began creating niche-specific content to influence people with thousands of followers all over social media, especially on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.
Consumer decisions are highly influenced by recommendations from friends and family. Recommendations over social media as reviews eventually play a big role in building brand credibility.
According to Instagram “Adore Me discovered the power of influencer marketing to reach and attract new, younger audiences, seeing a 37% lower cost per incremental purchase and a 7% higher sales conversion rate from ads that influencers posted.”
8. Effective Engagement
Social media is surely my favorite way to engage with my audience.
As a business, you post a variety of content especially tailored as per the interests of your audience. When people find your content creative and your videos informative or interesting they interact with it as likes, comments, shares, and saves. Engaging with your audience is one of the benefits of social media, leading to more conversions down the line.
Effective engagement brings your business accounts or pages more notice and generates credibility with people trusting and interacting with it. Most social media platforms have their algorithms designed to support quality engagement on created online content but making it work for you could be a task.
The football player Russell Wilson used Facebook and Instagram to build his personal brand resulting in having 4.6M+ video views on Facebook and 8M+ video views on Instagram.
9. Quick Customer Support On The Go
As I mentioned earlier about my two favorite benefits of social media, this one is surely the second.
What do you do if you’re in the middle of something and get stuck?
You ask for help! Social media has made seeking help or assistance the easiest and most convenient by providing means to connect businesses directly with their customers. The hassle of finding a brand online, visiting its website later, and eventually dropping them an email for assistance is all overcome with one-click direct messages.
Find a brand on social media, go through their products and if you have any questions then just click ‘message’ to write to them about it – simple!!
Humanizing brands allows us to connect one-on-one with the audience on a personal level which no bot can do. Timely customer support does wonders which can easily be achieved with social media platforms.
Get Started Today!
The advantages of social media are unmatchable and if you are ready to make the most of them, then it is time to get started. Get on board with at least 3 social media platforms, grab a limitless automation tool and start scheduling!
PRmention is a digital PR agency for startups & SaaS businesses. Occasionally, we accept high quality contributed content and we’d love to hear any ideas you may have. Feel free to email us on guestcolumn@prmention.com if you are interested in contributing.