Social media is so ubiquitous phenomenon that most of your digital time is spent on social media. Naturally, to target customers and influence buying decisions there is not a more valuable tool than social media. From driving website traffic to promoting products to low-cost marketing to quick business conversion, the influence of social media on business process and outcomes are spanned on several aspects. Here we have introduced 10 key benefits of social media for businesses.
1. Enhanced Brand Recognition and Brand Loyalty
With some active social media profiles and business pages, you can easily portray your brand effectively. Social profiles can project the voice and content of the brand. With the existing clients connecting you on social pages and allowing access to new clients, you can boost brand recognition quickly. With regular posts and updates, you can bring them closer to your brand.
Social media by its very nature allows the brands to connect with their audience at more personal level. While through regular posts you keep your brand alive in their mind you also let them relate any problem and issues concerning your products and services and respond to their queries.
2. Enhance Website Traffic and Boost Search Ranking
As an increasing number of people search for contents on social platforms, they have now evolved as search engines delivering equally robust search results from its active posts and discussions. Moreover, all major search engines including Google is extremely giving importance to social media presence and followers for search rankings. So, a robust social media presence is equally crucial for enhanced website traffic and good search ranks.
3. A Great Market Research Tool
Social media with millions of users and posts ca deliver a huge amount of user data in real time. Just consider the overwhelming volume of interactions on social media. More than 500 million Tweets, 4.5 billion Facebook Likes, and 95 million Instagram uploads clearly show the richest reserve of user data across the niches. Well, this huge volume of data can literally provide customer insights concerning their identity, preference, purchasing habit and brand awareness. This huge avenue of insights made social media an unmatched market research tool for businesses of all size and niches.
4. Growing from Local to Global
Social media united the world of business in a local to global scale and naturally small brick and mortar stores to regional retail chains, all now can target global audience and grope of presence beyond their boundaries through a robust social media presence. A small craft dealer in a small village can find his products extremely demandable by posting on social media and can find the growth that he never thought possible.
Moreover, through geo-location specific targeting or Geo-targeting became a great way for many big businesses to cater to specific audience or locality as per their preference. Social media allows you to send messages and send content based on this geo-targeting.
5. Customer Service
Through social media customer service becomes more value driven, committed and efficient. Without any extra cost, you allow your customers to connect you on any specific issues and get addressed by the company in real time. Without a dedicated customer care call center, you allow your customers connecting the business on anything. But to reap the benefits of social media as a platform for customer service, your business needs alert presence, responsiveness and continuous engagement with customers and community.
6. Highly Targeted Ads Delivering Real-time Results
Unlike media ads and outdoor campaigns, social media ads are inexpensive while playing an effective role in connecting audience and distributing content. Moreover, they are more effective for specific targeting of your customers. As staying indoors became a trend thanks to the huge time people give to mobile browsing and social media, social campaigns often get more views than traditional ads and media campaigns. The increasing digital time spent by people on social media coupled up with powerful targeting options made a social platforms ideal place to run ads that garner quick and real time results.
7. Better Business Conversion
With every post, shares and images businesses basically try to influence people to visit their website. These visitors are the business leads that you generate with your social page. Among the visitors from diverse sources, those who come from social media have a bigger chance to buy a product or opt for a service or revisit your site for browsing more. The latest statistics would suffice in proving how social media helps to enhance business conversion. As per a 2015 study conducted by State of Social Selling, close to 75% of businesses reported a hefty increase in sales of last 12 months due to social engagement.
8. Materializing Influencer Marketing
Social media offers awesome scopes for influencer marketing. Through your social profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus you can easily connect to influence people of your industry. Using social media for connecting influencers you can easily save the cost of traditional business networking and avoid the difficulty in reaching them. If you can build a network of followers carefully on social media it can be the most cost-effective means of building a professional network of influencers.
9. Keeping Tap on Emerging Trends
Just because everyone including the businesses and media houses constantly keep on publishing contents to drive traffic, it allows keeping track on all the relevant business news, promotions and trends in the market. Social media keeps you constantly updated about what is happening around you. Often without looking into industry journals and business pages you remain thoroughly updated on latest business news and trends just through social media.
10. Build Strong Customer Relationships
Social media offers you a robust scope to strengthen the bond with your existing customers. When you keep connecting and addressing your customers and potential audience in a valuable and relevant way, they keep looking for your posts and updates and a bond of trust is installed. While for many businesses customer retention remains a big challenge, your proactive social media presence can really help this. The dialogue between business brands and customers on social media is a typical aspects traditional marketing were not capable of.
Author Bio
Keval Padia is a Founder & CEO of Nimblechapps, a fast-growing web app development and mobile game development company. The current innovation and updates of the field lure him to express his views and thoughts on certain topics.