The Purpose Of Social Media For Business
The purpose of social media for business
Why should a business be social?
1. Social media builds brand awareness
Social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn are integrated into the lives of billions of people (about 1.6 billion to be exact). Many of those people could be potential employees, customers, suppliers, and partners for your business. Businesses must embrace the opportunity to engage in the lives of consumers. Social media provides an open forum to which everyone is invited to collaborate and share ideas, experiences and interests.
Social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn are integrated into the lives of billions of people (about 1.6 billion to be exact). Many of those people could be potential employees, customers, suppliers, and partners for your business. Businesses must embrace the opportunity to engage in the lives of consumers. Social media provides an open forum to which everyone is invited to collaborate and share ideas, experiences and interests.
2. Be found by potential leads
Before conducting business with a company, most consumers want more information. Social media has become a popular research tool. Engaging with consumers in this setting develops a relationship, provides an opportunity to answers questions, and ensures that potential leads have a positive experience with your company.
Before conducting business with a company, most consumers want more information. Social media has become a popular research tool. Engaging with consumers in this setting develops a relationship, provides an opportunity to answers questions, and ensures that potential leads have a positive experience with your company.
3. Build a community to grow the bottom line
By publishing content that’s relevant to your business, interested leads will interact with your content by commenting or contacting you directly. Responding to their comments online allows you to embrace interested leads and turn them into loyal followers. By “liking” your page on Facebook for example, leads will see future content that you publish over time. These “likes” are also referred to as followers, subscribers, or fans. Getting enough of them will build a community of people that wants to engage and do business with you. Soon, you may even have existing customers advocating on behalf of your business and working to recruit more business on your behalf!
By publishing content that’s relevant to your business, interested leads will interact with your content by commenting or contacting you directly. Responding to their comments online allows you to embrace interested leads and turn them into loyal followers. By “liking” your page on Facebook for example, leads will see future content that you publish over time. These “likes” are also referred to as followers, subscribers, or fans. Getting enough of them will build a community of people that wants to engage and do business with you. Soon, you may even have existing customers advocating on behalf of your business and working to recruit more business on your behalf!
4. Recruit customers by engaging in conversations
By publishing content that may be of interest to existing fans and future customers, leads will comment and interact with your content. Open up conversations with them by responding and asking them questions. This process will allow you to learn how to make things better. Invoke questions about the usability of your experience to better understand what clients are looking for.
By publishing content that may be of interest to existing fans and future customers, leads will comment and interact with your content. Open up conversations with them by responding and asking them questions. This process will allow you to learn how to make things better. Invoke questions about the usability of your experience to better understand what clients are looking for.
Using social media to market your business: the basics
Social media are internet services that let you interact with others and share and create content through online communities.
Social media present great marketing opportunities for businesses of all sizes. You can use social media to:
· promote the name of your brand and business
· tell customers about your goods and services
· find out what customers think of your business
· attract new customers
· build stronger relationships with existing customers.
Advantages of using social media
Social media marketing has many advantages:
· broad reach - social media can reach millions of people all around the world
· ability to target particular groups - many forms of social media (e.g. Facebook, Foursquare) allow businesses to target specific groups, often in particular locations
· free or low-cost - many forms of social media are free for business, and paid options are usually low-cost
· personal - social media allow you to communicate on a personal basis with individual customers and groups
· fast – you can quickly distribute information to many people
· easy - you don't need high level skills or computer equipment to participate in social media. The average person with a standard computer should have no difficulty.
Risks of using social media
Of course, marketing through social media also has its risks. These include:
· the rapid spread of the wrong kind of information about your business (e.g. incorrect information accidentally posted by you, negative reviews posted by others)
· legal problems if you don't follow privacy legislation and the laws regarding spam, copyright and other online issues.
It's important to be aware of these risks and to have strategies in place to avoid them if you decide to get involved in social media marketing.
Now that we have seen some examples of businesses really taking advantage of social media, here are some other reasons to get on board.
· Turn your customers into believers: I love it when brands reply me on Twitter. As a customer, I feel much more willing to recommend a brand to my friends if I am somehow connected to the brand on social media
· Build trust: We are in a world now where companies are expected to offer customers a personal touch. That means one on one engagement, and nothing makes that easier than social media. Not having an active account can actually damage your brand’s reputation.
· Build other sources of awareness and traffic: Don’t depend on search engine traffic! Build a more reliable online presence by diversifying your sources
· Learn about your customers: Customer statistics are easy to learn over sites like Facebook and Twitter. From basic demographics, to preferences, interests and potential tie ins to other businesses (collaboration hot right now), social media makes a great data gathering tool.
· Monitor and influence social media sentiment around your business: It is never nice to hear an insult about your business. But not even knowing it is out there is even worse. Social media gives you a chance to monitor your own reputation, and address issues the moment they creep up.
· Generate leads: The most successful call-to-action on Twitter is “Download”: Use this tip to promote your eBooks and build leads!
· Keep your eye on the competition: Don’t just monitor your own reputation, also look at the other guys. The competition (and their customers) are on social media, and you can learn a lot by watching them.
10 benefits of social media for business
1. Social media is an easy way to learn about your audience
For businesses in any industry, the key to success is knowing your audience. Social media makes this possible, and easier to accomplish than ever. With tools likeFacebook Insights in Hootsuite you can learn the dominant languages spoken among your social media audience, as well as their age and gender. This knowledge can help you cater campaigns and product offers to your target audience, which will provide you a better return on investment.
2. Social media helps target audiences more effectively
Geo-targeting is an effective way to send your message out to a specific audience or demographic based on their location. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter have tools that allow you to communicate the right kind of content to your audience. For example, in Hootsuite you can target by ‘Location’, ‘Language’, ‘Age’, ‘Gender’, ‘Relationship status’, ‘Interested in’, and ‘Education’ on Facebook, and ‘Country(s)’ on Twitter. For example, if you want to send out a post to people who speak Spanish, geo-targeting is an easy and effective way to do it.
3. Social media helps find new customers and expand your audience
Social networks like Twitter allow small businesses to locate their current customers or seek out potential customers. For example, if you open a new coffee shop in the neighbourhood, you can create a geo search in Hootsuite to locate anyone tweeting about needing a morning cup of joe within your area. After locating those tweeting about coffee, you can start reaching out to them, and invite them to come try a hot bevvy at your new coffee shop.
4. Social media allows you to receive instant feedback from your customers’ perspective
Social media for business gives you instant access to positive or negative feedback, which provides you with valuable insights on the customer perspective. For example, if you launch a new product and share it on social media, you’ll instantly learn what your customers think of it. Another way to gain customer perspective with social media is by learning how they use your product; brands often base new products or services on their customers’ original ideas. Below is Contiki Holidays’ take on learning what people feel or think about their experience on a Contiki tour.
5. Improve market intelligence and get ahead of your competitors with social media
With social media monitoring you can gain key information on your competitors, therefore improving your market intelligence. This kind of intel will allow you to make strategic business decisions in order to stay ahead of your competition. For example, you can create search streams in Hootsuite to monitor mentions of your competitor’s name or product. Based on your search results, you can improve your business to offer something your competitors are missing.
6. Social media can help increase website traffic and search ranking
So you built a website for your company, now what? One of the best benefits of social media for business is using it to increase your website traffic. Not only does social media help you direct people to your website, but the more social media shares you receive, the higher your search ranking will be. For example, if every person who follows Hootsuite on Twitter retweets this post, it’s more likely to rank higher in Google’s search engine results page for variations of “social media for business.”
7. Share content easier and faster with social media
In the past, marketers faced the challenge of ensuring their content reaches their customers in the shortest possible time. With the help of social media, sharing content got easier and faster. When you use social media for business, specifically for sharing content about your business or for content curation, all you need to do is simply share it on your brand’s social network accounts. But keep in mind that getting your customers to share your content with their followers means you need to make sure your social media content aligns to your brand and interests your audience.
8. Social media helps generate leads for one third of the cost
Social media is an easy way to generate leads. For example, Hootsuite’s marketing department was built around content and social platforms, and Twitter ads has allowed us to scale, increase reach, and fuel demand generation. Hootsuite promotes two types of content via Twitter Ads: ungated content (free content requiring no email address for access) and gated content (free content requiring an email). Sharing gated content on social media is a great way for any company to generate leads.
9. Create meaningful relationships with customers through social media
Social media is great for creating meaningful relationships with your customers. For example, social media allows tourism brands to create dialogue with travellers, therefore creating relationships with customers before, during, and after they have booked a trip with the company. This kind of social media dialogue between brands and customers is something traditional advertising will never achieve.
10. Social media lets you increase brand awareness and reach with little to no budget
Social media for business has allowed companies to increase brand awareness and reach of their brand at little to no cost. The costs associated with these strategies are a lot higher with traditional advertising methods. Recently, marketing departments across companies started hiring community managers to increase brand awareness and reach through social media. Community managers foster relationships with online audiences in different regions. At Hootsuite, we have community managers for each of our three regions: APAC, EMEA, and The Americas. This helps us make sure we keep expanding the reach of our brand to those regions and maintain relationships with key stakeholders.
