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.
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:
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.
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!).
Here are a few ideas for building community on 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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
Or, get all of this info (and more!) in one place by downloading our Key Metrics eBook!
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.
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!)
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.