What Social Media Can Do For Your Business
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Getty
Are you on social media, or do you use social media? There’s a difference. In today’s world, it seems like everything is online. Printed media, it seems, is becoming less relevant, which makes advertising in it less powerful. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I picked up a magazine and read it. In the past few years, I’ve really discovered what social media can do for my business, and I’ve cracked the code on how to make the most of it.
It took a few years of dedicated work on sites including Facebook and Instagram, but I figured out how to use these platforms to transform my business. That was a big deal. When I first started using the platforms, I wasn’t sure it would work especially Instagram. It seemed like these platforms worked better for people in the fashion and beauty industries . But where theres a will theres a way, and once I realized how to utilize the platforms correctly, my business grew exponentially and I started getting patients directly from Instagram and Facebook. Those patients referred family and friends, and the growth continued. One of the best parts was that I cut out almost all of my advertising expenses. I believe that if this can work for a small business like mine, it can work for any business.
Learn About Your Customers
People on social media, which means there’s a lot of data you can find on your target customers. You can then use that information to make more informed decisions in relation to your business, what your consumers are looking for and how best to reach them.
Take advantage of the analytics that every social network offers. Using the insights available, you can tailor your strategies to best speak to your target market/s.
Theres More Opportunity To Branch Out Among Social Media Networks
While some brands keep their social contained to a select number of platforms, typically hitting the big ones like Facebook and Instagram, there is now more opportunity than ever before to branch out.
Each social media network is different, and thus provides an opportunity to share different content and messages on different networks.
Right now, most companies have anywhere between four and 10 social profiles that they maintain. A strategy like this enables you to reach out to an older audience on Facebook, use an interesting image to , and foster professional relationships and thought leadership through LinkedIn posts, for example.
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What Budget Should You Set For Social Media Marketing
There is no magic number for social media marketing. While you should probably spend at least a little money on it, how much you get out of your spending will depend on the efficiency of your campaign.
According to WebStrategies, companies typically spend 15% to 25% of their total digital marketing budget on social media. That marks a nice place to start, but you can and should adjust your spending according to your ROI statistics once those numbers are available.
Kiely Kuligowski and Saige Driver contributed to the writing and reporting in this article. Source interviews were conducted for previous versions of this article.
Overlooked Social Media Benefits For Business
Its difficult to find a brand that isnt active on social media in some way, shape or form. This mass adoption makes sense when theres so much that social can do for your brand in the short and long term.
Retail, food, entertainment and real estate are just a few industries that can benefit from having a social media presence. Brands are leveraging social media to support their lead generation and business goals, but the beauty of social media is that it encompasses several purposes.
Here are 11 social media management benefits that often fly under the radar for modern businesses.
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Expanding Your Network And Influence
LinkedIn offers a variety of ways to expand your network by finding and connecting with relevant professionals in your industry. The key is to find, approach and connect with folks you already know, folks youd like to know and folks you should know. You should also post your own content, showing off your expertise on a regular basis.
Learn to use
Uncover Industry Trends In Real
Social media is a goldmine of business intelligence. Think about the transparent nature of it. Were able to see unfiltered, real-time conversations between consumers and brands alike. If you want to know what a brand is doing well or what customers are complaining about, its out there in the open.
Also, your target audiences social activity and shared content can clue you in on industry trends. For example, Instagram hashtags such as #summerootd can highlight everything from relevant influencers and content creators to fashion trends.
You can also use social listening to tap into those trends via social conversations.
For example, Sprout has a trend reporting feature that enables you to hone in on what customers are saying about your brand. You can track key terms and hashtags associated with your business, but these mentions and hashtags represent more than online chatter.
For example, social conversations can reveal everything from customer favorites to areas where your company is falling short. A flurry of praise or customer complaints can spur you to take action based on follower feedback. In turn, brands can come up with real-time solutions and products that their customers will buzz about.
Please dont write on walls, but we are sorry we took lime SKITTLES away.
SKITTLES
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Top 15 Benefits Of Social Media Marketing
There is no denying the fact that Social Media Marketing has many advantages for established brands as well as start-ups.
Imagine spending as little as 7 hours every week on increasing your businesss recognition, traffic, and sales with little to no cost. That can be a reality with Social Media Marketing Strategies.
Here are a few benefits and advantages of using social media platforms for business marketing:
Social Media Is Free To Use
Social media can cost nothing in terms of ad spend if the business youre working with isnt convinced to invest budget here. While spending money on advertising will help get you to your goals faster, copious amounts of budget are often also wasted on social media, while decision-makers might not be convinced that social provides a return on investment.
It doesnt matter. You can drive and demonstrate success through social media organically, provided you take some intelligent tactical approaches.
Make your posts the very best they can be by tailoring messages for each social media platform, using unique images and videos, hosting Facebook Live events, and inviting your existing email subscribers to join the conversation.
Use social media to develop meaningful partnerships and support your wider outreach strategy by showing some love to key influencers and complementary businesses. Join Facebook and LinkedIn groups to see what your potential followers are talking about, create content that adds to the debate and share it with them! Encourage your growing community to share and engage with your content, which can ultimately lead to more leads being interested in what the business has to offer.
Few things in life are truly free, however, and so is the way with running social media for business. While you dont need to spend on ads to drive success, theres a big time-cost associated with running, managing and monitoring social media feeds.
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Get The Most Out Of Social Media
Social media is a free tool that offers excellent benefits. So, why not use them to your business’s advantage?
You can utilize social media to engage with your clients, create a community around your brand, and pretty much profit off of some free marketing. Not to sound like a made-for-TV ad, but there’s more.
Most well-known social media platforms have aspects specifically designed to help you and your business. For instance, Facebook allows you to create a business page that centers around your brand. Instagram offers a new feature called Professional Dashboard that caters to the benefits of both businesses and creators. There’s also WhatsApp Business, and the list continues.
Look beyond shitposting and meme culture, and social media platforms can open many doors to you. Utilize them properly to boost your brand recognition and grow your business.
There Are Plenty Of Ways That Your Small Business Can Benefit From Social Media Marketing Here Are Eight Benefits Of Social Media That You Can Take Advantage Of:
1) Reduces your media costs
Providing engaging content on social media can help you to reach and expand your followers. Social media is free and if you choose to use social advertising – the cost is much less than traditional mediums.
2) Increase leads with organic traffic
When you claim your social media pages, it positively affects your rank in search engine results. This helps your potential customers to find you.
3) Serve your customers better
Customers frequently reach out to small businesses through social media. When you are engaged and responsive, you can provide better customer service to your customers.
4) Establish your brand’s message and voice
You can share your brand’s message and voice through your posts on social media. Perhaps you want to share a positive customer testimonial or maybe employee recognition. Regardless, regularly posting to social media can help you to increase brand awareness.
5) Interact with other businesses
You are probably aware that you can connect to consumers through social media, but did you know that you can also connect with other businesses? There are many opportunities to collaborate with other businesses and potential partners on social media.
6) Build your online reputation
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Learn More About Your Customers
Social media generates a huge amount of data about your customers in real-time. You can use that information to make smarter business decisions.
All of the major social networks offer analytics that provide demographic information about the people interacting with your account. This can help you tailor your social media marketing strategy to better speak to your real audience.
Weve created extensive guides on how to use analytics in , , ,, TikTok, Snapchat, and , so theres no excuse to remain in the dark about your customers and social followers.
A Window Into The Competition
In addition to getting a look at the true feelings and opinions of your customers and followers, social media is also a fantastic tool for checking up on your competition.
For instance, did your top competitor recently go viral by getting in on a brand-aligned social challenge? Did a call for user-generated content go particularly well for them?
Take these lessons and insights back to your company, and build on them to up your own social clout.
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Customer And Audience Engagement
Social networks allow you to interact directly with customers and fans, and likewise give them the chance to interact directly with your brand. Unlike traditional media, which offers only one-way communication, social media is a two-way street.
If you want customers and followers to be engaged, you have to be engaged yourself. Stay active and respond to comments and questions on your own social media posts in a way thats appropriate to your brand.
You can also use social media monitoring to keep an eye on what people are saying across the social web. Burger King doesnt just tweet, it responds to others who are mentioning BK, too.
im always here for you
Burger King
Open Honest Customer Feedback
Social platforms also offer an outlet for customers to share their honest feedback with companies.
While comments can sometimes feel like a segment of Jimmy Kimmels Mean Tweets, it also allows marketers to get a true and often unfiltered sense of customers feelings about the brand and its offerings. And hey, there could be some truth buried even within the seemingly harshest of consumer social media posts.
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Increase Brand Loyalty With Giveaways And Contests
Give your followers a treat every now and then by organizing contests and giveaways through your social media posts. They make you look extremely generous, and you phrase them just right, they can also be a source of hundreds of shares and likes. Additionally, they will keep your followers coming back in the hope of grabbing extra freebies.
Example: Muji Pen got thousands of shares with their contest. Whats better, their community engaged so hard they go almost as many entries!
How To Enhance Customer Service Abilities On Social Media
1. Make sure your social media presence is updated regularly. This will ensure that you have the latest information and updates about your business.
2. Use positive social media content to attract customers. For example, post positive reviews of your services or products on social media. This will remind customers of your good qualities and make them more likely to take action in the future.
3. Use hashtags to attract attention to specific posts or topics. Hashtags are short, easily remembered words that are used on social media to group posts together. This makes it easier for people to follow whats going on with a certain topic or post.
4. Engage with your customers on social media using questions and comments. Comments make it feel like youre a real person and can help improve customer service abilities by providing valuable feedback.
5. Create a blog or other online presence for your business. This will help you promote your business and connect with potential and current customers on a deeper level than just through social media platforms alone.
6. Remove any unnecessary clutter from your social media platforms by deleting unneeded posts, pictures, and other materials that dont contribute to the purpose of your social media channels.
7. Promote new content regularly and include links to popular articles or blog posts in your posts. This will keep readers engaged and motivated to stay tuned for new content from you as well as from other businesses that
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Extended Benefits Of Social Media
Social media has expanded marketing by creating person-to-person communication, allowing your brand to enter into conversations with end users. Another dimension of social media disruption lies in dematerialization, or doing more with less.
There are no physical limitations on social media, and technology enables a business to do more at a lower cost, like creating live events or extending their business hours and international reach.
Its The Softest Conversion Point You Have
Most businesses marketing online are looking to get something in return, and its likely that you or your client are too. Whether your business is aiming to drive sales, increased brand awareness, more website traffic, or all of the above, you should acknowledge that getting social media engagement is most likely the softest conversion point you possess.
By this, we mean that asking someone to engage with you on social media requires a much smaller buy-in from the prospect than getting them to sign up for a newsletter with their email address, or, moreover, make a purchase. However, you can warm them up over time.
Go the extra mile to make your social followers really happy, and the other benefits youre looking to get – traffic, leads, sales – will naturally follow.
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Measuring Success With Analytics
Without tracking data, you wont be able to determine the performance of your social media marketing tactics.
Google Analytics is a terrific social media marketing tool that may help you measure your most successful social media marketing efforts and determine which ones should be abandoned.
You may measure each social media platform to learn more about which of your social media post and content is performing best with your audience.
For gaining more knowledge about google analytics, you can check our short-term .
Customers Themselves Help Market Your Brand
Through social media, happy customers can do the advertising for you. You can/should encourage your clients to share reviews and experiences on your page. Not only that but they may share their experience on their own social media accounts, marketing your businesses to their network and contacts. This, my friends, is the Holy Grail.
Your brand authority becomes stronger if you get satisfied customers who share their positive experience with your network. Positive testimonials help reinforce the idea that when people choose to work with you, they are making the right decision.
As its name implies, social media involves interactions with people who share common interests. But that doesnt mean that its just you and your customers who will be interacting.
With an active social media page, customers can share experiences and advice with other customers. You may even get the attention of influencers in the field, allowing you to work with them to help increase your brand awareness.
At the end of the day, the networking potential of social media is endless! If you take the time to understand where your audience is located and how best to interact with them via social media, you too can harness the true marketing powers that social media has to offer.
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Disadvantages Of Social Media
Social mediamay not suit every business. If you launch your social media presence without planning, you could end up wasting valuable time and money.
Disadvantages of social media include:
- needing additional resources to manage your online presence
- social media is immediate and needs active daily monitoring
- you may get unwanted or inappropriate behaviour on your social media site
- the risk of getting negative feedback, information leaks or hacking
- the risk of having false or misleading claims made on your social media . These claims can be subject to consumer law. For example, if a customer or fan posts misleading or deceptive information, particularly about competitor products or services, you might receive a fine.
To avoid the risks, have a social media strategy with policies and procedures in place before you start.
Learn more about social media and consumer law.
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