With more than 3 billion people now on at least one social media platform, having an account for your business is more important than ever. Whether it be Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or Instagram, your social media page can provide a number of advantages for your business. Let’s take a look at the most prominent benefits.
Driving Traffic To Your Website
Garnering traffic from search engines like Google is not as easy as it seems. The first three results on Google’s SERP receive about 62% of all click-through-rates, and getting up there is extremely competitive. It takes six months to a year of SEO to finally see results. But one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to get links to your website is through social media. Primarily, Instagram.
Instagram allows you to put a link in your bio, which you can use to direct followers to blog posts, product pages, or whatever else you want. You can draw attention to the link in your bio by posting previews on your story or a separate post. The majority of users will access these pages through their mobile devices, so it is important that your website is mobile-friendly.
Engage With Your Audience
The whole nature of using social media is creating a community and audience that you can openly interact with. Companies can benefit from this by gaining an understanding of what their clients want to see, what they are interested in, and what they do and don’t like. It will also give your audience a sense of connection and loyalty to your business. Additionally, the larger and more devoted that your audience becomes, the more tweets, shares, follows, referrals, and general engagements you’ll receive. Engagements are a snowball effect, as they just keep building onto each other.
Keep in mind that your followers aren’t looking for constant sales pitches through your account. Finding a balance between engagement, brand awareness, and promotions is paramount.
Creating Customer Loyalty and Retention
As mentioned above, interacting with your audience through social media can create a trusting relationship that will help you retain old customers and gather new ones. When you have devoted followers who feel a personal connection to your business, they are more likely to talk about you to their own friends and followers. People tend to trust recommendations from people that they know, so word-of-mouth marketing is invaluable.
Cost-Effective
Unlike most other traditional marketing tactics and resources, the majority of social media platforms are free-of-charge. Additionally, you don’t need a huge team of “social media experts” with years of study in the field. Even someone who is completely new to social media will find that using it quickly becomes instinctual. This gives smaller businesses the opportunity to compete with larger corporations. All is fair on Instagram and Twitter.
Types Of Company Social Media Pages
There are a few different social media accounts that your company can use. Some companies, such as NeuroXPF, will have an official business page that a member of their staff runs. Others, such as My Soul CBD, may have their employees post about the company on their own personal accounts.
Official business pages will garnish more authority and typically gain followers through hashtags, shares, and engagements with others in their industry. They are also more likely to drive traffic to their websites. Personal pages have a leg up because they already have a certain number of followers, so they are not starting from scratch. However, because those followers are primarily family and friends, they are not likely to convert to customers quite as easily. Nonetheless, both official and personal company social pages will get the job done.
Looking For Inspiration
If you’ve never used social media for business before, you might not know where to start. Taking a look at your competitor’s pages can give you inspiration for content to create. An array of advice, fun facts, recommendations, and insider tips are always good to start with.
As you can see, social media gives companies a whole new level of customer information, engagement, loyalty, and retention, all for free. If you’re not quite convinced, try it for yourself. With about 40% of the world’s population participating, it doesn’t take long for anyone, company or not, to gain traction on social media.
Elena Goodson – Outside of work, I also am a stand-up comedian and run my own website, Slow Boat Library. I speak five languages (English, French, German, Italian, and Arabic) and studied marketing, communications, and journalism in more than six countries in Europe and the Middle East.
4 Ways Social Media Can Help Your Business
Understanding eCommerce presented by Digital Media Marketing
