13 Social Media Marketing Benefits for Your Small Business

Are you taking advantage of everything social media has to offer your small business?

When used well, social media marketing can empower your business and provide access to customers, markets, insights, advertising capabilities, and other opportunities you won’t find anywhere else. 

These days, a robust social media marketing strategy is no longer optional for small businesses. Building a social media presence is crucial if you want to effectively reach your target audience. What’s more, today’s consumers expect to be able to find their favorite brands and businesses online.

Engaging your audience on social media is a great way to gain visibility, attract new followers, demonstrate your expertise, and promote your brand. But that’s only the beginning of the advantages your business can experience through social media marketing.

Let’s take a look at 13 of the biggest social media marketing benefits for your small business and how to make sure your business is taking advantage of them.

1. Increased Brand Awareness

People can’t buy from you if they don’t know you exist. And social media is one of the best ways to spread the word about your company, brand, products, or services. 

A whopping 4.9 million people worldwide use social media in some capacity (that’s more than 60% of the world’s population!). Building a social media presence for your brand helps you target and capture some of that audience. 

It’s essentially an endless opportunity to connect with potential customers and showcase your company through creative, informative content. Social media gives you the chance to: 

• Differentiate yourself from the competition
• Win over the attention of your target audience
• Position your brand as a thought leader and the go-to authority in your industry

2. Build Credibility and Loyalty 

As we mentioned, today’s consumers expect the companies they do business with to have a social media presence. If your brand doesn’t have a presence somewhere on social media, that could be a red flag for potential customers. They may wonder if you’re still in business, and be hesitant to connect with you.

Customer engagement goes a long way toward building credibility, customer loyalty, and trust. The more consistently you post on social media, the more credibility you build with potential clients. You’ll build even more trust if you consistently and quickly respond to comments and direct messages.

Social media marketing helps you humanize your brand by sharing information about your business, highlighting how current customers use and benefit from your products or services, and ultimately building connections with your followers.

3. Boost Your Content Marketing Efforts

Social media is an ideal place to promote the content you’ve already created and posted on your website, including blogs, eBooks, white papers, guides, and more. 

We’re all so busy and inundated with information these days that it can be easy for people to miss or forget about the helpful content you have on your website. Social media posts are a great way to remind followers of the content you already have on your website and make it easy for them to access it.

You can also repurpose content you’ve written on your website into social media posts. For example: try using some of the information from a blog you wrote to create posts on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn and start a conversation with your followers around that topic.

In addition, paying attention to what content gets the most engagement on social media can help you tailor your future content strategy accordingly (give the people what they want!).

4. Drive Traffic to Your Website

With consistent effort over time, your social media marketing can help you drive more traffic to your website. Here are a few ways to do that:

• Include a link on your profile to your website’s home page.
• Post a teaser for your latest blog (or other content like eBooks or whitepapers), then include a link to read the full article.
• Post information about products for sale on your site, with a link to purchase.
• Encourage third-party content by asking your followers to link to your website in their own posts about the products they’ve bought or services they’ve used.

5. Build Community Around Your Brand 

Social media gives you the opportunity to gather people who have similar interests and build a community around those interests and passions. That kind of community can be a huge boost to customer engagement and loyalty.

Here are a few ideas for building community on social media:

• Partner with influencers who are relevant to your brand to engage their following. 
• Create a branded hashtag your followers can use when they talk about your products or services online. Include it in your own social posts, on your website, and on printed materials like store receipts, invoices, product tags, information sent with packages you ship, etc.
• Ask questions or run polls to encourage a response from your followers.
• Encourage user-generated content (UGC) by running a contest or using a hashtag. This gives you more content to share with your followers, boosts engagement, and sparks interest in your brand.

6. Stay Top-of-Mind

One of the biggest rules in marketing is to show up where your target audience is already spending time. And these days, that means social media.

The average person spends 2.5 hours on social media every day. Every time your brand flashes in front of their eyes while they’re scrolling, it increases the chances they’ll eventually buy from you. 

While they may not need your product or service right now, consistent social media posting can help ensure your company is top of mind when they do. The more they see your brand show up on their social media feed, the more likely followers will be to think of you first when they’re ready to make a purchase.

7. Offer More Value To Your Customer Base

Social media can help you keep past and current customers engaged long after they buy by sharing content that provides them with something valuable. 

Use your social media posts to educate your followers on relevant topics within your industry or on the details about your products or services.

For example, post product tips like how to use or maintain a product, tips for most effective use, and so on. Or, educate your audience on how to know when you need a particular service or what to expect when they hire you.

Providing value to your customers in this way will help keep them engaged and encourage them to do business with you again in the future.

8. Improve Communication

Social media is a great place to communicate with your audience and boost your customer experience. It makes you easier to reach, offers an easy way for your staff to answer questions (and spend less time on phone calls), and gives you the opportunity to educate your audience about your offerings and announce news and updates.

Your social media accounts also give you another avenue to manage your company’s reputation, respond to customer concerns, offer client support, and generally engage with your audience.

A few tips for communicating well on social media:

• Make sure to reply to comments and direct messages promptly.
• Respond to all comments.
• When responding to negative comments or reviews, keep it kind and professional while addressing their concerns.

9. Gain Direct Audience Feedback

Speaking of communication, social media platforms give consumers a chance to offer direct feedback (good or bad) about their experience with your company or products.

Through commenting on, liking, and sharing your posts, sending direct messages, and (on some platforms) leaving ratings and reviews, social media users can easily let you know what they think. 

This kind of direct audience feedback is an invaluable part of improving your products, services, and customer experience.

10. Gather Insights 

Social media marketing gives you an opportunity to learn about your customer base, gathering insights like demographics, what content they respond to the most, what they’re interested in learning more about, and so on. 

Each platform offers analytics that give you a better understanding of the people who engage with your content. This better positions you to target your audience, meet the needs of your customers, and humanize your brand through a well-informed content strategy.

Engaging in social media monitoring (paying attention to what people are saying about your company or your products) helps you stay up to date on changes in consumer sentiment and your industry overall. 

It can also help you keep an eye on your competition to learn more about what they’re doing (new products, promotions, etc) and what consumers think about them.

11. Measurable Metrics

Every social media platform offers a way to track a variety of metrics, including follower demographics, reach, click-through rate, engagement rate, and much more. As you can imagine, these metrics give you valuable information about your audience and their engagement (or lack thereof) with your content.

Every platform has a different way to track these metrics. To learn more about the different metrics you can track in some of the most popular social media platforms, check out these blogs our team wrote:

• Top LinkedIn Key Metrics To Track for Better Business Networking
• Measure Your Instagram Success With These 9 Instagram Key Metrics
• 10 Key Facebook Metrics To Track for Better Social Media Marketing
• Improve Your Facebook Ads With These 9 Key Metrics

Or, get all of this info (and more!) in one place by downloading our Key Metrics eBook!

12. Inexpensive Advertising

Social media advertising is one of the most cost-effective ways to promote your business, distribute your content, and reach your ideal audience. 

Through social media ads, you can target and reach millions of potential customers quickly. Social media platforms offer robust targeting choices (like demographic data, region, language, and more) that allow you to reach the right audience and maximize your ROI. That way, you’re not wasting precious advertising dollars on campaigns that don’t reach the right market.

Plus, with the massive international audience that social media ads can reach, this method of advertising is highly scalable based on your needs and goals.

13. Powerful Lead Generation

Social media lead generation is a powerful way to target and reach new customers. Each platform offers a wide variety of targeting options so you can easily reach the people who are most likely to be interested in your business.

Because social media has become such an integral part of our daily lives, today’s consumers are more likely to discover your business on social media than on TV, radio, or any other outlet.

In fact, a recent study showed that 55% of consumers learn about new brands on social media. 

If you’re not promoting your brand on social media, you can bet you’re losing potential customers to your competitors who are. (And this isn’t just for B2C businesses—LinkedIn is an impressive lead generation tool for B2B businesses!) 

Wild Fig Can Help You Reap These Social Media Marketing Benefits for Your Small Business (and More!)

If you’re not on social media, or if you haven’t taken full advantage of everything these platforms have to offer, you can bet you’re missing out on some valuable insight, customer engagement, and leads. 

But, if you’re like most small businesses, you probably don’t have as much time as you’d like to invest in your social media management. 

That’s where the Wild Fig team comes in! We’ll help you craft a powerful social media marketing strategy that reaches your target audience, engages your followers, and draws in new leads for your business.

To learn more about how we can help you improve your social media marketing, schedule a free 15-minute exploratory call.