How Businesses Use Social Media

How Businesses Use Social Media

how to use social media marketing for business

Business social media is no longer optional. It’s a crucial way to reach out to your clients, gain useful insights, and develop your brand.

What Are The Benefits of Using Social Media For Your Business?

benefits of social media marketing for business

Consider that more than 3 billion people are now using social networks across the entire globe. A good chunk of these people are using social media to connect with brands.

There are more people following new and recognised brands on social media than celebrities do. On Instagram alone, 80 percent of people are following at least one or more branded companies.

If you’re not taking advantage of the world of social media, you’re missing out on an easy, cheap, productive and alternative way to market to almost half of the world’s population.

Let’s take a look at the many ways that social media can help you communicate, interact, and develop your company’s online presence.

Benefits of Social Media For Brand Building

brand building

Increase Brand Awareness For Your Company

With nearly half of the world’s population using social media channels, it is a natural place to gain new and highly targeted potential customers.

Do you really think that people just link to brands that they already know about on social media? Take into account that 60 percent of Instagram users say they discover new products on the platform.

When Absolut Vodka launched an Instagram campaign to market its limited-edition Spark bottle, the company achieved a five-point rise in brand recognition.

2. Humanise Your Brand

A recent UK study found that more than half of adults do not trust a brand until they see “real-world evidence” that the brand meets its promise.

To communicate with customers — and potential customers — you need to demonstrate the human side of your brand. How do you embrace the ideals of your brand? (Do you even have brand values?) How are you looking after the best interests of your clients and employees? Is your product really working?

The opportunity to build a real human interaction is one of the main business advantages of social media. These are Meaningful Relationship Moments. You can also introduce your followers to the people who make up your business and show how loyal customers use and benefit from your goods.

Social marketing can be a perfect way to humanise the brand.

Establish Your Brand As A Thought Leader

It doesn’t matter what field your company is in, social media provides an opportunity to build your brand as a thought leader — a go-to source for information on niche-related topics.

Thought leadership is a great way to create customer interest. In reality, LinkedIn’s research, in collaboration with Edelman shows that marketers underestimate how much thought leadership can influence trust, particularly for B2B marketers. Around half of the B2B marketers surveyed believed that their thought leadership would create trust in their businesses. But, did you know that more than 80 percent of buyers said thought leadership would build trust?

The 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer further identified that 63 % of people trust technical experts, in comparison to only 42% of people who trust business.

CEO of Hootsuite, Ryan Holmes, has more than 1.5 million followers on LinkedIn alone. This is where he shares his insights into social media and entrepreneurship.

LinkedIn — particularly LinkedIn Publishing Platform — is a great social network to concentrate on when it comes to establishing itself as a thought leader and it’s a great place to establish your own personal brand and work on your own personal online reputation.

Top-of-Mind Awareness Needed

Most social media users log into their sociel media accounts at least once a day, according to Pew Research Center, and several people check social accounts at least several times a day.

Social media gives people and businesses the ability to connect with fans and followers every time they log in. Keep your social posts entertaining and insightful, and your fans would be delighted to see your latest content in their streams, keeping you at the top of their mind because you’re their first stop when they’re about to make a purchase.

Benefits of Social Media For Growth

the power of social media

Increase Website Traffic

Social networking posts and advertising are key ways to get visitors to your site. Sharing interesting and informative content from your blog or website to your social media is a great way to get your followers reading as soon as you publish a new article.

Participating in social chats — like the # HootChat Weekly on Twitter — can also be a fantastic way to improve your exposure, get new people’s interest, highlight your skills, and drive traffic to your website.

Show great interest in the chat, rather than being too promotional. Also make sure that your URL is included in all of your social media profile so that people who want to know more about you can do so with one simple click. An even better idea, would be to use a pinned post to highlight a landing page on your website that ‘s important to the conversation.

6. Generate leads

Social networking provides an simple and low-profile way for potential customers to show their interest in your company and goods. Lead generation is such an essential advantage of social media for companies that many social networks provide advertisement formats explicitly designed to capture leads.

Renault Europe used a Facebook lead ads campaign that allowed people who were interested in learning more about a new car model could book a test drive directly from the Facebook page/ad itself, with just a few taps.

Ads had a 7.9-fold lower cost per lead than ads connected to the form on the car manufacturer’s website.

Boost Sales

No matter what you’re selling, social media will help you sell it. Your social media is a vital part of your sales funnel — the process in which a one of your new contacts becomes a paying customer.

The number of people using social media continues to increase and social sales tools expand, social networks will become increasingly relevant for product search and e-commerce. It’s time to match the social media and sales objectives.

Social sales is now a vital method for individual sales professionals.

Partner With Influencers

Word of mouth guides 20 to 50 percent of buying decisions. When you get people to talk about your product or business on social media, you build brand recognition and reputation and set up more sales.

One main way to drive social word of mouth is to work with influencers — people who have a good social media following and who can draw the brand ‘s attention.

Research from Nielsen, Carat, and YouTube showed that collaborating with an influencer will make the brand four times more familiar than collaborating with an A list celebrity.

Benefits of Social Media for Content Marketing

social media content marketing

To Promote Your Content

Promoting your company’s content on social media is a perfect way to introduce your smart, well-researched content to new people, to prove your knowledge and to expand your audience.

For example, Adobe used LinkedIn Supported Content to display its study, including infographics and videos.

Marketing decision-makers exposed to Adobe’s promoted content were 50 percent more likely to see Adobe as shaping the future of online marketing and 79 percent more likely to accept that Adobe might help them maximise their advertising spending.

Make sure you have a content marketing strategy in place to optimise social media for business benefits.

10. Go viral

When people begin to like, comment and share your social media, your content is introduced to new audiences — their friends and followers. Going viral takes this idea a step further. When people share your content with their networks, and their networks follow suit, your content spreads across the Internet, accumulating thousands or even millions of shares.

This visibility is particularly advantageous because all of these shares, likes, and comments indicate an established link to your brand. If you see that your friend likes your article, you might be inclined to check out what they have to say, even if they’ve never heard of your company before. In a world where there is much more content than anyone could ever absorb, a friend’s social share functions as a kind of pre-screening.

Going viral is not an easy task, of course, but it would be almost impossible without social media.

Source content

There are two main ways corporations can access social media content:

Source ideas: Ask your social media followers what they want, or participate in social listening, to come up with ideas for content that you can make yourself. Put clearly, give people what they’re looking for. Ask them questions and provide answers to their questions in the form of a blog post on your website or linkedin and then share it with them.

Source material for posts: host a contest or use a hashtag to share user-generated source content (UGC). Having your followers involved will create awareness for your brand while also providing you with a library of social media posts that can be shared on your platforms over time.

How much content can you get through the UGC campaign? Take a look at the #wanderlustcontest hashtag from the National Geographic, which created more than 60,000 tweets with the same tag.

Benefits of Social Media For Communication

social media communication

Reputation Management

Your consumers are already talking about you on social media, whether or not you are there to reply. If you and your team members are on the ball, you can pick up effective social media posts about your brand to highlight the positive and fix the negative before it becomes a big problem.

Is anyone suggesting something about your company that isn’t true? Be sure to express your side of the storey in a respectful, professional manner. Is anyone singing your praises? Give them a lot of thanks and draw attention to their kind words.

Crisis Communication

When two black men were arrested at the Philadelphia Starbucks store, the hashtag # BoycottStarbucks went viral and fast. The hashtag has been used more than 100,000 times in just three days. Officially, this is a disaster.

Starbucks replied quickly to its credit.

after the first apology, the company followed up with a few more posts on social media and then announced that it would close all of its stores for a race-bias training day. It remains to be seen what the impact of this incident would be on the Starbucks brand, but the repercussions would almost certainly have been worse if the company had not reacted quickly and adequately to social media.

Will the business have a crisis management strategy in place? Although smaller brands may not have a crisis on such a wide scale, a smaller number of shares may have a devastating effect within a tight-knit group or niche.

Silence is not an choice when it comes to reacting to social media crises. Maintaining well-run and maintained social media and getting a strategy in place will help make sure that you are ready and available to participate if the worst happens.

Customer and Audience Engagement

Social networks give you the opportunity to connect directly with consumers and fans, and also give people the opportunity to interact directly with your brand. Unlike traditional media, which provide only one-way contact, social media is a two-way street.

If you want clients and followers to be engaged, you have to be engaged. Stay active on your accounts and respond to comments and questions about your own social media posts in a way that is suitable and good for your brand.

You can also use social media tracking to keep an eye on what people say across the social network.

Customer Service & Customer Support

The public expect brands to be available on social media and to scan their social accounts for customer support. Research reported in the Harvard Business Review indicates that brands that do not meet these standards are detrimental to their bottom line.

The HBR study, which specifically looks at Tweets, shows that consumers who get a response to their Tweet will be willing to spend more on a later purchase with the brand, particularly if they get a response within the first few minutes. This is valid even if the original Tweet was a really bad complaint.

What are the social media advantages of gaining insight?

Track discussions related to your brand

We listed social media tracking as an important part of the interaction of the audience. But it’s also critical as a key source of intelligence for your brand, your rivals, and your niche.

Learn more about your customers

A huge amount of information about your customers is created in real time by social media. To make better business decisions, you can use this knowledge.

All major social networks have analytics that provide demographic details about people engaging with your account. In order to better interact with your real audience, this will help you customise your strategy.

We’ve built detailed guides on how to use analytics on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Pinterest, so there’s no reason to keep your customers and social followers in the dark.

Gauge sentiment around your brand

Lots of mentions is a positive thing, isn’t it? Sure, in a lot of situations. But if you get a lot of talk with a negative feeling, you need to do some quick thinking to figure out what’s wrong and get to grips with the problem.

Nick Martin, the Social Engagement Coordinator of Hootsuite, describes social media sentiment as “the perceived positive or negative mood of posting or engagement on social media.”

Although it’s important to know how often people talk about your brand online, it’s also important to know how people really feel about your brand.

Using social media for your company helps you to remain on top of your sentiment research so that you can protect your brand image.

19. Keep an eye on the competition

It’s also useful to know what people are saying to you about your rivals.

For example, monitoring your competitors could expose pain points with their goods that you might reach out and fix, winning new customers in the process.

When Uber Canada launched a free ice cream promotion in Vancouver for a day, things went hopelessly wrong. When people couldn’t get their free ice cream, they weren’t very happy about it. They immediately took social media to vent.

The social media marketing team at Skip The Dishes saw a chance and reached out to people complaining about Uber’s free delivery of their own ice cream in the form of a Skip The Dishes credit. All these Uber haters soon became fans of Skip The Dishes and new customers (because you had to build a Skip The Dishes Account to get your free ice cream).

Monitoring competition on social media also ensures that you will be aware when your rivals launch new goods, launch promotions and release new reports or results.

20. Stay on top of industry news

Things are going quickly in the online world — and you can’t afford to be left behind. Keeping a virtual ear on the ground by social listening means that you’re still aware of potential developments in your field that might impact your way of doing business.

Benefits of social media for advertising

Targeted advertising

Social ads are a cheap way to promote your business and distribute content. They also offer powerful targeting solutions so that you can hit the right audience and make the most of your budget.

Savvy advertisers have embraced this primary advantage of social media for business: they would spend twice as much on ad placements on Facebook as they do on newspaper advertisements.

With ad-targeting choices, including demographic details, geography, language, and even online activity, you can craft tailored messages that better appeal to various groups of potential customers and only pay for the exact viewers you want to attract.

Retargeting

Nearly 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned.

People who have abandoned their items in a shopping cart are future prime customers. Think about this – they have already found your website, browsed your items, and made a decision as to what they would want. People are leaving shopping carts for a variety of reasons, but anyone who has shown this level of interest in your business should not be overlooked.

Using monitoring tools such as the Facebook Pixel, you can show these potential customers social media advertisements for the same items they have browsed on your website or put in the shopping cart.

For example, the Craftsy craft site used Facebook advertising to advertise goods to people who have already interacted with the Craftsy product page on the Craftsy site.

The campaign saw a 4.3-fold return on advertising expenditures and a 33-per cent rise in Facebook-driven sales.

What Are The Benefits of Social Media Marketing For Proving ROI?

Reporting and analytics

It is always a challenge for marketers to prove their return on investment. But with social media monitoring and analytics software, you can see the full effect of your social media interactions, from a follow-up to interaction by transactions.

Tools such as Google Analytics and Hootsuite Impact monitor web traffic created by social media, conversions, email sign-ups, and ROI for both organic and paid social media campaigns.

UTM parameters are another great monitoring tool that will help you see which social networks offer the most benefits to your company.

 

Share:

Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
LinkedIn
Reddit

Related Posts