The Internet and particularly social media have opened the world to global interactions. It is not a problem anymore to keep in touch with friends and relatives from other parts of the world. Social networking sites have grown to global societies of billions of virtual inhabitants.
Our planet has just become smaller and more approachable, not only in personal, but also business interactions. It means that even a small company can go global without enormous investments. How can you leverage these platforms in your business? And what is good about social networking?
How can you leverage these platforms in your business? And what is good about social networking?
1. Social Networking Makes Relationships More Personal
Social media is a two-way channel where you have an opportunity to build a rapport with your clients and prospects. These platforms are not about amazing sales pitch you deliver to the audience. Social networking is all about interactions and an open dialogue with users. Social media helps you humanize a brand and build genuine relationships with your community. It shortens the distance from your audience, especially when you address them from personal accounts.
They engage in discussions with immediate and adequate responses that resonate with the community. They show a human face of the brand and win the hearts of clients.
2. You Can Promote Your Business More Effectively
According to a study, 78 percent of small businesses attract new customers through social media.
The most common way to promote a business on social networking sites is advertising. Thanks to the advanced options of targeting and re-marketing you are able to address the message to the audience that would more likely be interested in your products and services. Facebook and Twitter paid advertising is relatively cheap and with a well-knitted social media strategy your efforts will pay off.
However, paid advertising is not the only way to reach out to target customers. A more time-consuming, but effective method to get a new customer is reaching out to consumers who report a certain need that your company can fulfill.
Social listening tools help you find such mentions and comments. There are thousands of people asking for recommendations online every day. And every time a person posts a question “Where can I buy…?” or “What would you recommend for…?” you can find him or her and offer them help.
3. You Get Valuable Insights about Audience and Your Business
Users ask, recommend, but they also share reviews.
They are the best source of information for product development. They are the ones who use your service so they know best what can be improved to fit their needs.
If something does not work well they are likely to report it in social media exposing it to a great deal of other consumers. Their feedback is gold for getting answers about your customers’ preferences in and behavior. Use it to find inspiration and ideas for new variants of your products and improvements in a current offer.
4. Social Networking Induces Loyalty
When your company is present on social networking sites you are more approachable and reliable in the eyes of customers and prospects. This is directly connected to the first point of this article. If you can build more personal and genuine relationships with a community, customers will be less likely to switch between brands. Showing them a human face will make you a sort of their friend rather than just another company that sells good products and that is replaceable. Remember that it is comes much easier to swap a service provider, but can be harder to dump a close mate.
5. Social Media Increases Website Traffic
Finally, social networking presence is essential in attracting traffic to your website. Not only it directly drives traffic to a page, but it also improves search ranking. As you probably know, SEO is an enduring and laborious process that helps you get to the top of Google’s search results. External links, number of visits, selected keywords and website content have an impact on how well you turn out against your competitors in search engines. Social media can help you improve these factors, both thanks to direct traffic, but also shared links through social media users’ profiles.
Your social media goals will determine the metrics that matter to you, and it’s important to measure these to ensure you’re on the right track with your strategy. For instance, if you wanted to increase traffic to your site, then you’d want to pay attention to the amount of referral traffic coming from your social networks.
There are many resources you can rely on for metrics, including Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics and page insights, Sprout Social, LinkedIn company pages report, Keyhole, Twitter analytics and keyword reports.
Facebook itself has 1.71 billion users making it one of the biggest communities in the world (bigger than China’s population!).
And we can give a huge credit to social networking sites that helped us grow the community of loyal fans who contributed to the success.
