What can Social Media do for Businesses and their Brands

From a 6 year old to a 60 year old, everybody today knows about social media. Nearly 2/3rds of the world population is on some form of a social media platform or another. Hence, I’m not going to waste your time on telling you what Social media is. Rather, we’re going to dive directly in to the facts and figures surrounding social media and how various social media platforms can help your business.

Social media facts and figures:

·      93% of marketers use social media for business

·      70% of marketers have used Facebook to gain new customers

·      43% of marketers have used Twitter to gain new customers

·      82% of SMEs say they find social media effective to gain new customers, while 90% say they find it effective for branding

·      72% of consumers trust reviews on Social media, as much as they trust their friends’.

·      42% of consumers have used Social media to voice their complaints

Social Media is a Must in Today’s date

Traditional mediums are becoming more expensive and less cost efficient with every passing day. On the other hand, social media marketing is enabling businesses to not only connect with consumers directly but also helping in influencing them.

Some of the key factors why social media is a must for businesses today are:

·      It helps brands to reach out to a larger number of audiences / consumers.

·      It gives you a platform to tell your brand’s story.

·      It helps generate relevant leads.

·      It provides you with a platform to grow and cultivate a relationship with consumers.

·      It enables you and your consumers to have a 2 way personal communication.

·      It helps you keep track of what consumers are talking about you in reali-time.

·      It helps you build a community of influencers and followers, who can help grow your brand in the online world.

·      Today more and more businesses are found through search engines. Social media presence helps better your search engine ranking, making it more likely for consumers to find you.

How can Social Media presence benefit you?

1.     Social media makes it very easy and simple for you to understand the demography of your consumers.

2.     It helps you target these consumers effectively and more cost efficiently, on the basis of their gender, age, location, expertise, preferences, likes, dislikes and other demographical factors.

3.     It helps you to receive real time customer feedback and queries.

4.     It helps you to build and fruitful relations with your current and prospective consumers. 

5.     It helps you generate leads at the minimum possible cost.

6.     It helps you to stay updated about your competitors.

7.     It can spread word about your brand easily and quickly

8.     Last but not the least, social media can build your brand online, at no cost at all.

Keep customers in mind when creating Social Media content

While creating content on social media, ask yourself, “How will this add value to my consumers?”. Keep the content relevant to your brand and your consumers, so that they can connect to it. The content need not only talk about the positives or advantages of your brand. It also needs to answer the queries of your consumers. Once your content is ready, you need to publish them on a plethora of social media platforms, so as to maximize your reach. Use social media influencers to promote your content and reach more consumers indirectly. 

The Heavy weights of Social Media

Facebook has over 1.39 Billion users, which makes it the best platform to connect with consumers all over the world. It gives businesses the freedom to choose from a variety of options regardless of the industry and is a great place to start building an audience, especially for new business. Facebook, allows your to share important information, details, updates, photos about your brand. It also allows you to not only promote your brand’s pages, posts but also advertise and sell your products.

Twitter on the other hand has approximately 500 million users worldwide and is best medium to get the word out quickly. It allows you to post short 140 characters text along with images, videos and links. An advantage Twitter provides is that you can connect with anyone on Twitter by just mentioning his or her username (aka handle). Thus making it the fastest platform for customer to reach out to you with their grievances. With the help of relevant content and a handful of influencers, your brand awareness can be increased many folds.

 

Instagram – is a visually driven social media platform, having over 300 Million users. Currently owned by Facebook, Instagram may not be the best fit to promote all businesses. But if you’re from the art, fashion, travel, food and other similar industries, this is a platform, which you should definitely be present on. With the right hashtags and high quality photos and videos, you can definitely make Instagram work for you.

YouTube is a video-sharing website with user-generated and corporate content. Registered users are allowed to upload, view and share videos. YouTube gets over 800 Million unique visitors coming to their site in month, 100 million video views a day and over 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute. YouTube, gives brands to tell their story and connect with audiences using the moving picture platform. Businesses can promote their brands either through the Youtube’s video ads or by paying content aggregators with a substantial following.

When choosing your social media platform, keep in mind there’s no one-size-fits-all. You need to figure out which platforms fit your needs and which platforms will give you the best mileage at the least possible cost. So choose wisely.