In years past social media was just a way to keep in contact with your friends and share the occasional cat meme, but these social platforms have swiftly become marketing giants, allowing businesses to easily share content and sell services to an almost endless audience. If your business doesn’t have social media or actively use social media its possible to say you may be dead in the water as you aren’t represented.
SEO
One of the most important reasons to use social media is the SEO benefit to your business. Whilst you may not believe it, having and actively using social media helps.
If you’re reading this the chances are you clicked on it from a link on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn and that alone has helped with SEO because the more traffic driven to the your site the higher your rankings will be. So making sure your content actively drives people to your site drastically helps.
This along with the fact that Google priorities content that has more likes & shares means social media plays a large part in your day to day SEO ranking.
Customer Insight
So customers sharing your content can help your SEO rank but it also provides you with something else – customer insight.
Each social media platform provides its own insight section and there are various services that can put it all in one dashboard for you, it just depends how you like to manage it. But however you do manage it, you can see what your customers like to read by seeing what they share, like and comment on. This helps you know what sort of content your customers are likely to enjoy and in turn share, like and comment on.
Customer Experience
Social media has quickly become a huge part of the customer journey, as stats show over 67% of consumers use social media for customer service and platforms such as Facebook displaying publicly your average response rate and time it quickly becomes obvious if you aren’t replying to customers. Whilst you may not always receive positive comments or messages, it’s proven in studies that if you are responding to negative messages and comments it can help drive brand loyalty.
We often find a lot of customers who have purchased scripts from our CodeCanyon store reach out to us on Facebook or Twitter and occasionally even clients search for help with their existing website because they follow us or have found us on social media.
Marketing
By far one of the best features about social media for business is the marketing potential. You can publish promoted or sponsored content on most social media platforms but in this example I’ll focus on Facebook’s marketing potential. Facebook allows you to target users by factors of age, sex, location, industry, education level and even based on content they’ve liked on Facebook previously. This means instead of paying hundreds (or thousands) of pounds to have a page in a magazine that will be seen by whoever picks it up you can target specific audiences and pay whatever your monthly budget on marketing may be and let Facebook divide that up over the month. In the past it could take days or weeks for ads to be actually published on paper, but now it takes seconds to get your content out there and have customers sharing it.
Competitor Research
Whilst this may be on the darker side of things, social media allows you to keep an eye on what your competitors are up too. If you have competition locally you want to be getting the followers they might be getting first so they are in your ecosystem rather than theirs.
By doing this it also allows you to make strategic decisions to stay ahead of them.
To sum things up, if you aren’t already get your business on as many social networks as you can and manage and use them actively. The benefits they offer are huge and invaluable to any business. Make sure you spend sometime to learn the nuance’s of each network to get the most of each one.