Discover Real Value Using Social Media for Business
5 Min Read
Social media is a valuable business tool for reaching new customers, increasing sales, and building brand awareness. By developing practical social media strategies, companies can improve their bottom line while creating a community of engaged consumers. Here are the top benefits of social media for business, along with methods for making tactics successful.
Sustained Growth of Social Media Engagement
Social media engagement is continuing to grow, as an estimate shows that more than 3 billion people will use platforms each month in 2021. In 2017, Facebook alone had 2 billion monthly users. These statistics illustrate the benefits of social media for business — and provide motivation for companies to bring Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube into their media strategy.
By maintaining an active presence on popular social media sites, your business can enhance consumer relations and foster product research to help people make informed purchasing decisions. These platforms also provide a seamless way to monitor customer feedback and conversations. As a result, you can leverage social engagement to keep customers informed, accelerate sales, and boost profits.
Tips for Using Social Media for Business
Follow these tips to use social media to reach motivated shoppers, build a loyal following, and illustrate your brand’s story.
Deploy Targeted Advertising
One of the key benefits of social media for businesses is the ability funnel consumers to e-commerce stores. Most social platforms offer options for creating targeted ads, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Be sure to develop ad campaigns to provide people with the right content and offer. This way, social media users will not only discover your page, but they may become your customers.
To build a successful targeted advertising campaign on social media, you must determine which platform will perform the best for you organically. The more followers you have on a platform, the better chance you will have of achieving organic engagement. For example, if you have a much larger following on Instagram than on Twitter, creating an Instagram campaign will likely produce better results.
Also, consider the demographics of social media users to gauge whether they will become your customers. If your brand sells quilting supplies, conduct consumer research to find the best audience for your products. This process could show that you can generate more sales by marketing on Pinterest than other social platforms.
Engage With Your Audience
Many social media users would rather watch a short video than read a lengthy post. So, it’s essential to incorporate video content across your social media pages. Content ideas include offering a behind-the-scenes look at how you make your products and a live feed of your business at a trade show. While simple, these activities can attract people to your accounts and help you gain followers.
Before you develop videos, consider the types of content that your ideal consumers will find engaging. All content should also fit within your brand identity, using humor or emotion in ways that match the image you want to project. When executed well, this content can foster social conversations that result in a spike in likes, retweets, and followers.
Additionally, social media should be, in fact, social. After all, one of the central benefits of social media for business is having the opportunity to interact with customers directly. As a social media marketer, you should respond to user comments and questions. Creating this relationship with your followers can increase brand loyalty, trust, and awareness, not to mention sales.
Tell Your Brand Story
Audiences value compelling storytelling. By telling your brand story on social media, your business can stand out among the competition. It’s important to humanize your story, as people would rather connect with other people instead of companies, according to the social engagement company Post Planner. That’s why stories should center on the people behind your brand. But be sure this content reflects your mission and values.
You can also craft brief narratives in your social media updates. By telling micro-stories that show how a problem is resolved, your audience may relate to the content on a deeper level, which could generate more likes, comments, and shares. As more people engage with the content, it can appear in more feeds and expand your brand awareness even further.
Work With Influencers
A Tomoson survey found that influencer marketing is the fastest-growing channel for gaining customers. That same survey found that 22% of marketers consider influencer marketing to be the most cost-effective method of customer acquisition.
As the role of influencers in marketing has increased, more companies have begun collaborating with them. If your brand works with an influencer who has a large following within your niche, you could expand your consumer reach tremendously. As shown by a CivicScience study, 34% of Instagram users purchased a product based on the recommendation of an influencer or blogger. This buying behavior may stem from a willingness of influencers to engage with their social media followers.
Learn How to Use Social Media for Business
As these strategies show, there are many benefits of social media for businesses. Using social media strategically is one of the most cost-effective ways to build brand awareness and boost sales. But social media is one of many channels that marketers leverage. Now, you can gain the skills and knowledge to connect with customers when you earn an online B.S. in Marketing.
At Concordia University, St. Paul, you will gain marketing expertise in social media and more engaging channels. The program defines core business principles, along with marketing tools and best practices. You will experience a convenient online format that allows you to complete coursework when and where works best for you.