If you still aren’t convinced and your business hasn’t started using social media yet, here are 8 compelling reasons to do so.
As a business, understanding your target audience and their motivation to follow you on social media is key in determining how to best connect with, and grow your audience. Knowing your own USPs and understanding your customers well, will help give your business a voice and means you’ll be able to create and curate content that resonates with your followers.
We all know that social media is a must these days and that a huge and growing number of businesses are utilising social media as part of their marketing, but for those that aren’t yet on board; what are the benefits of investing in social media?
1. Social media helps you deliver better customer service
Twitter is often a first port of call for many customers who have pre-sales or support related questions. Leaving customer questions to go unanswered makes a business look unprofessional and like they just don’t care, so it’s crucial that you are visible on the social networks that your customers are using, and that you are regularly monitoring all of your channels for brand mentions and customer questions.
Real-time communication helps to make happy customers which in turn creates brand evangelists who drive positive brand sentiment. I’ve seen customers converted time and time again thanks to businesses answering pre-sales questions promptly; being active on social media really is a great way of positively influencing sales.
2. Social media drives brand building & differentiation
Social media makes it easy to improve brand awareness and build your brands identity. You can effectively establish your brands personality and give your business a human voice that people can relate to.
Connecting on an emotional level or showing some personality are both effective ways of helping your brand stand out from your competitors.
3. Social media helps you to manage your reputation
Managing your reputation online is a critical part of any marketing strategy and social media provides you with a fast and effective way to do this. When dealt with swiftly and sensitively comments and complaints can be dealt with effectively, this instant feedback demonstrates high levels of customer service and can effectively diffuse negativity and resolve any issues that the customer may have.
Negative sentiment can often be turned into positive in a very public way. Such a visible demonstration of strong customer service and problem resolution can have a very powerful effect. The customer is now happy and won’t go on to post bad reviews and warn their friends not to use the company, instead, they are more likely to tell them that the company provides great customer service.
4. Social media helps increase trust in your business or brand
With so many alternatives to choose from, customers are often overwhelmed and want an easy way to authenticate a business that they are dealing with for the first time.
Seeing that you are active on social media helps to fill potential customers with trust, it signals that you care about your customers and should anything go wrong, that it will be easy to contact you.
5. Social media allows you to obtain real customer insights
Customer insights can drive the development of social media campaigns and shape strategic decisions, helping you to make your website content and product or service offerings more attractive and relevant to your customers. Social media makes it quick and easy for businesses to obtain feedback from customers, which will give you a clearer idea of brand sentiment and help you identify common pain points you can address.
6. Social media is a great way of promoting your content
We all know how important content marketing is, not only in terms of SEO, but in order to attract new customers. Help increase awareness of each new blog article or news post that you publish, by shouting about them on social media.
Social media when used in conjunction with high quality content creation is a highly effective way to attract new customers to you and also helps you to build authority in your area of expertise.
7. Social media helps you keep customers engaged with you
Social media is a great way of keeping your business or brand in the mind of your customers. This means you can actively influence purchasing decisions and helps to foster customer loyalty and encourage repeat purchases.
8. Social media will drive website traffic
Being active on social media will help you increase the amount of traffic that your website receives. Successful social media activities will always improve the amount of traffic referrals your website receives, playing an essential initial role in your sales funnel.
Social media as an SEO ranking signal is increasing in importance. Being talked about and mentioned on social media is a positive signal that shows you are popular and have content worth sharing and talking about. This in turn drives Google to regard your website as being more authoritative, which is one of the many signals that helps your website rank better in orgainc SEO.
Written by Shell Robshaw-Bryan. To read the full article, please click here.