Every business no matter how big or small will benefit from having a social media presence. It helps you to increase brand awareness, connect with your existing and new customers and improve loyalty and trust.
What’s even better is it’s so easy to get started, you don’t need to be a social media pro to at least have a presence on social media platforms. But as your customers are logging into these platforms daily, it would be crazy to not be popping up in their news feed.
If you’re not in the position to bring in a social media pro to help you with this, then you can still create your accounts and simply post useful content on these platforms to start building a presence where so many of your current and future clients are. I've listed below some real benefits to ALL sized businesses of having a social media presence.
It Helps to Grow Brand Awareness
Social media makes it so easy to spread the word about your business, what you do and what you stand for. It helps to showcase your businesses personality.
Improves Brand Loyalty and Trust
By being present on social media, you are making it easier for your clients to connect with you. Customer retention is such a high priority for all businesses, which means building relationships is key. Social media is the perfect tool to do that, you are opening your business for all to see, they can keep updated on the latest news about you, they can see what other customers think about you and how you’re interacting with them. This all builds up a relationship which then helps to improve their loyalty and trust for your business.
Helps to Engage with your Customers
Social media is all about being, well, social! So interaction is key, every post that you create is open to engagement, people can like, comment or even share with their friends and family. This is a great way of spreading the word even further about your business. The more people that engage with your content the more people it will naturally reach. Many times, these will be people that you don’t even know and who wouldn’t necessarily come across your business if it weren’t for social media. All of this then circles right back to building loyalty and trust for your brand.
It's Cost Effective
Social media doesn’t have to cost you anything. If you have no budget at all, simply being present and adding content to your social media pages can help to grow your business organically without spending a penny.
If you want to advertise through social media, then it is widely known that social media advertising is arguably one of the most cost-effective ways. You can start advertising for as little as £10 for a week.
The beauty of advertising through social is it’s free and easy to set up an account and you set the budget you want for your advertising. Always start small to test the water first and see what works and what doesn’t for you.
Provides an Opportunity to Communicate Brand Authority
Customers research everything before they buy now. Before committing to buying a product or service most people will do a quick search for a website and social media pages. What they find when they do these searches is up to you. By encouraging engagement on your social pages through your content, new customers will see up to date information, they can see you are engaging and responding to your customers and they can see comments that your customers are making.
Effectively your social pages and your existing customers will be doing the advertising for you, it’s a no brainer!
Provides an Opportunity to Show Authenticity
Social media gives you the chance to show your business’s personality. This comes back to branding and brand awareness. Decide how you want your customers to see your business and then commit to it and have fun with it in your social media. People respond better to humans, so showcase that side of your business.
Can be used as a Market Research Tool
Listening to your customers to fully understand what they want, and need is key for all businesses to adapt and stay ahead of the curve. Social media is perfect for helping you with that. Social listening is exactly what it sounds like, listening to your audience to find out how you can best serve them.
Social media can effectively be used as a market research tool to find out things like what your customers are doing, who they’re engaging with, what their key problems related to your industry are, what are they interested in, what are their opinions on different topics. The list of things you can find out is endless, and your customers are sharing it all on social media, you just need to be present on it yourself to listen!
Provides opportunity to align and collaborate with other businesses
Not only are you more visible to customers, but you also have access to see other businesses that you may not have known about, that could potentially work with you on specific campaigns.
This is often used in competitions, for example two businesses jointly carry out a competition which provides a joint prize for people following both pages and carrying out specific actions. This helps to share your brand to the collaborating businesses followers and vice versa, it is also cost effective as you split any costs for this.
There are so many other ways to collaborate with other businesses that can help to build your social media followers and brand awareness, the above is just one. But as you can see social media makes these opportunities a lot easier for you to research and reach out to other businesses and then plan and execute your campaign.
Whatever Your Business, Social Media is Well Worth Investing your Time and Effort in
So, if you haven’t set up your social media platforms yet, what are you waiting for? You have nothing to lose by giving it a go and everything to gain for your business. If you don't know where to start I'm happy to provide guidance on first steps or help you to build up a plan.
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