Reasons Why Your Business Needs a Social Media Presence
When social media started taking shape two decades ago, no one imagined how vital they would become to businesses in the future, not even the creators themselves could predict this. The idea they had in mind at inception was to create a site that helps people connect with others. Instead, social media took a life of its own and has now become an indispensable tool for businesses. The following are reasons why your business must have a social media presence.
Marketing is Cheaper and Efficient
Forget TV and radio ads. Forget setting up costly billboards that may not be seen by your intended target. Nothing has revolutionized marketing the way social media has. It is cheap, it is organic, and it has a far wider reach than anything ever created before. There are so many ways you can pull off marketing through social media, you can talk directly to your followers, or you can hire a social media manager to handle the marketing for you.
It Provides a Platform to Connect with Your Audience
Communication is real-time these days. With smartphones and internet access getting bigger and better with time, you will always find a sizable amount of people online at any given time. The ability to communicate with your clients directly creates a very healthy rapport that helps your business. For Instance, if you are running an online watch shop, you could use your social media pages to create an engaging tutorial disseminating fashion tips like how to pair watches with clothes, or DIY tips like how to do a watch battery replacement and any other issue they may need help with.
It Builds Brand Loyalty
It used to be an uphill task for small businesses to create any brand awareness on their own as they would immediately be drowned by the big conglomerates who had the resources to pull off big ads. With social media, however, the playing field was leveled up. Now anyone is able to build a loyal client base that sticks with them, as long as quality products and services continue to be provided.
Building a credible brand is something, which will attract loyal customers. However, you need to understand that building credibility and loyalty is as much a feature of good marketing as it is of developing a great product and providing excellent customer service. Popularizing customer testimonials on social media can have youtube views, Facebook likes and IGTV shares. All this will allow you to build solid brand loyalty.
It Gives You the Freedom to Create Content
When you are creatively inclined, you will find it very fulfilling creating content to increase awareness of your brand and attract traffic towards your business. You could be a writer, for example, using SEO-optimized blogs to bump up your business rankings in online searches. If you are running an online store, you could start a YouTube channel, creating review videos for your products and using the traffic generated there to promote your main business. All this without any charge.
It Helps You Track Your Performance
With the help of analytical tools provided by social media platforms, you can be able to tell how well your marketing has worked by analyzing how your target audience interacted with your campaign strategies and how many people were influenced into spending on your products and services based on what you advertised. These tools do a better job than anything ever seen, with most of them virtually free.
To Extract Feedback
The one advantage of incorporating social media into your business is the availability of quick feedback. With review features enabled on most social media platforms, you can get feedback on your goods and services from your customers in real-time. Some may be mean at times but somewhere in there, you may find very constructive criticism that will help you improve. This is something you can never achieve outside of social media.
To Keep Up with Your Competition
If you do not have social media pages for your business, you are most likely losing all potential clients to your competitors who have set up social media platforms for their businesses. Without a social media presence, people will find it hard to buy into what you are selling and will be drawn towards those that have a social media account on their favorite platforms. You can use your platform to check out what your competition is doing and find ways to beat them at their own game.
The Drawbacks
Every good thing has some drawbacks. As much as integrating your social media with your business is a good thing, there are some pitfalls you need to be wary of. Some of them include the following:
- Running a social media page requires a lot of time and energy. It would be impossible to focus on your core business if you have to split your time with engaging people on Twitter or Facebook.
- You will need to invest in a qualified social media manager to help you with the marketing end of your business, and this is another added cost you could do without.
- Coming up with content can be hard, especially if you have already caught the interest of many people. It is easy to lose customers if your content becomes boring or repetitive.
- You will be exposed to trolls and bad publicity. All it would take is a small slip up, and the whole internet will be on your case. This could be bad for your brand.
Conclusion
It is evident that social media is vital for the survival of your business. It will take some form of learning and adjustments to make the two work. Do not be scared to experiment with different platforms until you find the one that works best for your business.
Personal contact info – slikgepotenuz@gmail.com
Permanent Address :- Montville, NJ
CEO and co-founder at Cloudsmallbusinessservice.com