Many business owners fail to realize the importance of social media. For many without the experience, social media is just another supplemental tool to get the word out there, but they don’t believe it has any real power in generating customers or purchases.
In reality, social media is an excellent tool for creating loyal, engaged customers or clients. According to CeBit, 75% of customers are influenced by a business’s social media presence. Take a look at these 10 ways having a strong social media presence is guaranteed to increase your business.
1. Search Engine Optimization Opportunities
For many potential customers who are not already loyal to another brand or service, the first place they turn to when they need a new product is a search engine. How strong your SEO keywords are and how well they’re used throughout your website determines where your page falls on the list of search results.
The stronger your SEO game is, the more likely your website will turn up on the first page. With few people moving on to the second page of results before selecting a service, the top bunch of results is where you want to be. Now that Google has started including Tweets in their search results, that means you have the opportunity to make it to the first page with every Tweet you send out.
2. Customer Service
When it comes to resolving an issue, more and more customers are turning to social media to get their problems addressed, and they expect a quick response. Gone are the days of sending an email and hoping someone reads it, or waiting on hold to talk to a customer service representative over the phone. With 32% of unhappy customers expecting a social media response within 30 minutes, it’s necessary to have someone monitoring your accounts. That number increases to 42% when the expected response time reaches 60 minutes.
3. Strong Social Media Can Lead to Investors
When trying to get some monetary backing for your business, it is important to have a strong social media presence to show investors. More and more investors are looking at how well done a company’s social media campaigns are before giving them their money.
4. Community Involvement
Social media allows your customers to interact with one another, but also allows their followers and friends to see they are engaging with your company. Most marketers already know that a recommendation from a trusted friend or family member will do wonders for getting more repeat business, and the same is true for social media.
5. Engage with Your Customers
Social media gives companies the opportunity to interact with customers you’ll most likely never have the opportunity to meet in real life. If you’re a business without a retail store, or a large business physically incapable of meeting with your loyal customers, social media accounts give you an excellent opportunity to give your company a personality.
7. Get Feedback
Most social media platforms leave the option to review a company, but the big sites are Facebook and Yelp. When that feedback is positive, other potential customers can see the excellent experience others had with your company. Setting up social media accounts that allow others to share the great time they had with your company will encourage others considering your services to purchase as well.
8. Everyone Else is Doing It
The majority of the product-purchasing world has, at least, one social media account, and depending on your target demographic, they could be on more. When it comes to small businesses, 8 in 10 are utilizing digital marketing to increase their business, and they’re at a great advantage compared to the 2 business that aren’t. From the same study, 3 in 5 say they have gotten new customers from their social marketing efforts.
9. Promote Your Blog
Unless you have a blog strong enough to keep readers returning on their own, you need to promote your blog somewhere, and your social media accounts are the perfect place. When using Facebook or Twitter to notify your network that a new post is on your website, you are giving your community of buyers the opportunity to share the information with their own network.
10. Share Your Story, and Make it Personal
For many businesses, social media provides an outlet for sharing the story of how the business was created, how it got where it is today, and give an inside view of what the company culture is like. Having a better understanding of what the company is truly like will lead to individuals feeling more compelled to do business with you.
Conclusion
Businesses can’t afford not to invest in social media. For many businesses it may seem like it’s just one extra step that takes the focus away from major marketing goals, the reality is more and more marketing is being done as digital marketing. With potential customers choosing to read online publications over physical magazines, or turn to video streaming sites instead of traditional cable, businesses are losing impressions on the typical advertising avenues. As the digital marketing world grows, traditional marketing shrinks, and the longer it takes to get your business into social media, the harder it will be to succeed. Lucky for you, adopting digital marketing is the solution.
Download our FREE Infographic “10 Guaranteed Ways Social Media Can Increase Your Business” for even more information!
