Over the last twenty years, social media has proven to be very beneficial.
At one time it was a communication experiment that evolved later into social platforms which figured out how much personal information people would share with their “digital networks.” Today, social media is an even larger part of the daily lives of people than ever before.
Social media has been able to come up with a way for businesses to send the messaging of their brand to the right individuals at the right time in hopes that your brand will stick out enough for them to be interested in your company, let alone stay loyal throughout their lifetimes.
Using social media offers businesses many benefits.
The following are the top reasons why it is critical for businesses to be active on social media, and why it can help to ensure that your brand is successful.
Easier, Faster Communication
Social media makes it possible for customers to get in touch with a customer representative easier and faster than ever before.
Businesses also can receive, read, and respond to grievances from customers easier and easier than ever.
Depending on the grievance and industry, there might still be some remaining challenges. However, lines of communication that were hard to get established in the past are not nearly as hard to do now.
Contacting the right individuals is faster than ever before, and you often don’t even need to call anyone. It is becoming easier as an increasing number of brands and consumers use social media platforms as a means to stay in touch with people that matter to them the most and to their businesses.
Customers are not able to provide feedback to businesses in real-time like they never have been able to before, and that is something that businesses have been trying to do for a very long time.
Partnerships & Networking
Along with simplifying lines of communication, general availability is another important aspect.
Without the right type of assistance (agent, publicist, etc.) there is part of the world’s population that is nearly impossible for most average people to ever be able to communicate with directly.
Also, think of all of the athletes, actresses, actors, and other high-profile individuals that the average person can never communicate with.
Social media now allow us to connect with others easier than ever.
Even policymakers and politicians are now much more available these days – and often have to face backlash – due to social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
Although it is a lot of fun to get a “follow back” from President Barack Obama or receiving a retweet from your favourite band, there is also an endless amount of potential for partnerships and networking that can help your brand in many different ways.
Some of these ways include improved branding, increased referral visits, shoutouts, and backlinks.
It is much easier to build quality relationships using the streamlined communication that social media offers and developing relationships with key influencers can earn your brand a great deal of value.
The following are examples of the extra value that is facilitated by these connections:
Gives Your Organic Visibility A Boost
Social media can unlock so much value apart from partnership-produced backlinks and networking.
Along with the SEO value that is received from obtaining quality backlinks for your website (via social media relationships and other ways that social media helps you acquire various types of links to give you a healthy and quality backlink profile) relevancy signals as well as other types of signals are sent by social media to the search engines such as Google to help to ensure that popular content is easy to share and highly visible.
It is very important to understand that way that SEO is affected by social media also.
Google has said repeatedly that social media backlinks, shares, favourites, likes, etc. are not direct types of ranking signals. However, there are definite correlations between why and how a site is ranked by the search engines and social media popularity and activity.
So although shares on social media do not provide full-value, actual backlinks, the marketers, webmasters, brands, and people that might see the content from your brand on social media might also link to it (if it is quality content that offers real value) and these backlinks will definitely provide real value to your brand.
Increase Traffic to Your Website
Social media channels are a supplement to your brand’s website, as well as your brick-and-mortar location if you have one.
The intent of social media is to reach various audiences in an entertaining, useful, and personable way and to refer these potential customers that you might not have had the opportunity to engage with before to get to know you better and try your business out.
When done correctly this always works well.
Both foot traffic and website traffic should increase from effective social media engagement. Your messaging should reflect this.
Feedback from Customers
In the business world of profits and sales, no matter what industry you are a part of, and who you are selling and marketing to, your focus definitely needs to be on customers.
And you will achieve success, both traditionally and digitally, by understanding and providing the highest quality customer service and doing everything you can to make sure your customers and prospective customers have the best experience with your business possible.
Of course, the service or product you sell needs to be good as well. However, there will always be customers who are unhappy. The way you respond to these customers – no matter how “bad” or “good” their feedback might be – is critical to the longstanding reputation and online success of your business.
Social media helps you maintain your reputation by providing you with platforms that allow you to interact with your customers directly in ways you were never able to do in the past. That also means you get real customer feedback from the source directly, faster than you ever have before (and in a much more raw form as well).
This incredible opportunity should be used by businesses to develop their brands into genuine, customer-first operations, and build the reputation of their brand eventually into one that is instantly recognizable and can be relied on by its ever-increasing customer base for many years into the future.
Impress Prospective Customers
Along with maintaining the respected reputation of your brand is the opportunity to impress prospective customers with the way you handle unrelated interactions with other customers.
People frequently turn to and even depend on online review sites and social media to learn what a company is really like. Similar to marketers, consumers use social media as a means to help them make better decisions and purchases.
People on average consider 10 reviews on a local business prior to making a decision to buy. That provides potential customers with the opportunity to see that a business really cares about its customers even after making a sale. This is very important to both customers and the success of a business.
Track Your Competitors
Social media channels make it possible to track overall marketing practices and tactics, and also those tactics that are being used by your direct competition.
There is a lot that can be learned from your competitors.
No one is completely perfect. There is always something new to learn. The ultimate goal is to have customers understand and rely on you over your competition based on your expertise and authoritative way you approach your niche.
Your competition is trying to do the same things that you are (develop and protect their brand’s reputation and to sell its services or products ultimately). That is why it is worthwhile monitoring and discovering what that our business can improve how you entertain and educate users, in addition to the things that your brand is doing well, and how to improve overall.
Every business has its own goals and its own way of measuring success.
Social media has the ability to help you achieve your goals. However, it is very important that you stick with the basics and make sure you use them to help your brand become successful.
Each brand is unique. Allow yours to truly shine on social media.
