Using social media for business has many advantages. Here are eight business benefits that social media provides.
● Brand awareness: Billions of people worldwide use social media every day, and it makes sense to put your business where the customers are. For example, according to Facebook, about 60% of Instagram users find new products using the platform. Social media is an invaluable tool for building a brand and boosting brand awareness.
● Brand personality: It’s becoming more crucial than ever for businesses to have a distinct voice and engage with customers on a human level. Social media provides an easy avenue for creating a visual brand, allowing you to develop an identity and a voice to showcase your brand values and engage with followers.
● Thought leadership: Social media allows businesses to become thought leaders and stand out from their competitors, establishing themselves as industry leaders through engaging and relevant content. You can do this by sharing creative content on Instagram, writing thoughtful blog posts for LinkedIn or showing a fresh perspective in tweets.
● Increased website traffic: If your followers like your social media content, they become interested in you and will go to your business website to learn more about your company. This means higher website traffic and potentially more sales for you.
● Reputation management: Reputation is everything, and social media gives you the perfect opportunity to communicate with customers and solve issues quickly. You can even create a unique hashtag your followers can use if they have a question or complaint to ensure the right people see it. You can also use social media to highlight positive reviews or comments.
● Analytics and insights: Most social media platforms have analytics tools, allowing you to monitor follower counts, engagement rates and click-through rates. These numbers can help you determine the kinds of content your followers respond to best and tweak your marketing strategy accordingly.
● Targeted advertisements: It’s easy to create ads on social platforms, and the benefit is that you can specifically target them to suit your audience. Research has shown that users respond better when ads are tailored to them, which often increases engagement.
● Competitor analysis: Aside from engaging with customers, social media helps you monitor your competitors. Follow your competitors and note what works well for them and what doesn’t. Work those insights into your social media marketing strategy.
How to track social media ROI
You’ll need to consider several factors when formulating, setting up and tracking your business’s social media ROI.
● Determine your immediate goals. Many organizations that have difficulty measuring social media ROI haven’t defined specific, tangible goals. The key to successfully measuring ROI is setting achievable business goals and building your strategy to accomplish them.
● Understand your long-term goals. Ensure you understand your ultimate goal – what all your smaller, more immediate goals will build to. This end-goal vision will unify your social media efforts. Your ultimate goal should align with your business’s branding and communications guidelines.
● Pinpoint metrics to track. Once you know your goals and how to achieve them, pinpoint the metrics you want to track, including engagement, audience, reach and sentiment. Understand how you’ll apply that information to your strategy.
● Ignore “vanity metrics.” You’ll track several metrics once your social media marketing campaign gets underway. Some of these metrics are called “vanity metrics” because they’re visible to the naked eye but don’t necessarily tell the whole story about a campaign’s success. Consider tracking more in-depth metrics, such as conversions from the traffic generated by a campaign, to tell the whole story and properly measure ROI. [Learn more about tracking your conversions.]
● Build relationships with your followers. When your followers feel that they have a relationship with you, they’re more likely to engage with your content and follow through with a purchase or commitment to your business.
● Focus on quality, not quantity. Be thoughtful with your social media posts, providing carefully considered content. Your social media is there to serve your business and achieve a goal, not just to exist. Spend time considering your photos, captions and hashtags appropriately for each platform. Publishing tools like Hootsuite or Later can help you set up and preview posts before they go live.
● Analyze spending against your success rates. Spending is one of the most straightforward metrics to measure. As you analyze the success of your campaign, be sure to consider all the money spent and how it was utilized.
Social media platforms for businesses
Here’s an overview of the most popular social media platforms and their business tools.
Facebook is an extremely popular social media network with a varied audience of more than 2.9 billion active monthly users as of 2022. It’s worthwhile for any business of any size to use Facebook’s business tools and have a Facebook business page.
Use Facebook to share everything from photos to essential company updates. With a business account, you have access to powerful advertising tools and in-depth analytics. Business pages also have many customization options, highlighting your contact information, hours of operation, the products and services you offer, and much more
Instagram is also incredibly popular, with more than 1.1 billion active users in 2022. From Instagram Live to Instagram Stories, there is no shortage of Instagram business tools that help brands promote and sell their services and products. Instagram is a visual platform focused on photo and video posts, so it’s an excellent tool for businesses with strong visual content to share. It’s also almost entirely mobile, with tools and services optimized for mobile.
More artistic niches tend to excel on Instagram, but most businesses can benefit from the platform and its broad user base if you target your audience. Your Instagram account manager should have a good eye for detail and some photography skills, ensuring the photos and videos posted to your account are high quality.
While Twitter is great for short updates, engaging with followers and sharing links to blog posts, the platform isn’t ideal for all businesses.
On Twitter, you can share short tweets (240 characters or fewer), videos, images, links, polls and more. It’s also easy to interact with your audience on this platform by mentioning users in your posts along with liking and retweeting tweets.
If you’re a highly visual business or you don’t have a strong brand voice, you may want to skip this social media network. However, many companies excel on Twitter because they have a unique, on-brand voice they use to their advantage.
Other companies use Twitter for business functions like handling customer service; active Twitter-using customers will seek out companies to express concerns or share praise.
If you have interesting content and can engagingly voice that content, Twitter is an excellent tool for quickly spreading the word. Hashtags help boost posts, and if a user with many followers retweets you, your content could go viral.
It’s essential to find balance with Twitter. Don’t just share your links or media; ensure you’re also sharing interesting, relevant content from other Twitter users.
This visually oriented platform allows users to save and display content by “pinning” digital bulletin boards, which can be organized by category. For example, a personal user might have a food board dedicated to pinning recipes, another board dedicated to photography and so on.
Pinterest uses for business include a series of special pins called Rich Pins, which brands can use to add specific information to their pins, including product details and location maps. Every pin on Pinterest includes an image or video, making it a purely visual platform. As such, Pinterest is not the place for you to share information like your business hours.
Pinterest is great for niche businesses, but it may not be for every company. Popular categories on the site are DIY projects, fashion, exercise, beauty, photography and food. That’s not to say that businesses outside these categories can’t succeed on the platform, but it makes Pinterest an especially good marketing tool for businesses in those areas.
Snapchat
Snapchat is a mobile-only, visual social media network known for its disappearing content. Users can send videos and photos to each other or post content to their public Stories, which disappear after 24 hours. The app has expanded to include chat, messaging, image storage, events and media content. Now, content posted on Snapchat can easily be saved and uploaded elsewhere.
Because posts are temporary, there is less pressure to create super-polished content. You can also see how many and which specific users viewed your story. When it comes to Snapchat for business, a small business will most likely utilize the platform’s Stories feature. However, keep in mind that only users who have added you can view your Stories content. Once you have an audience, Stories allows you to easily create story-driven and interactive content.
YouTube
Google-owned YouTube is a video-sharing platform where people can view, upload, rate, share and comment on content. The site is a massive hub for news and entertainment.
Many businesses on YouTube have a creative, visual or educational component. The platform is heavily creative, so it’s essential to have a dedicated video editor producing content. However, your business doesn’t need a channel to market on the platform; there’s a subculture of YouTube influencers who publish frequent videos and often maintain large audiences.
Often, businesses partner with YouTubers for product placement because these users already have engaged audiences. Using YouTube influencers can be an easier way of marketing your business on the platform since you don’t have to put in the time and effort to create content and build a following, which can take years.
LinkedIn has 260 million monthly users and is the best platform for professional networking. As far as LinkedIn business uses, it’s an excellent place to find top talent, position yourself as an industry leader and promote your business.
LinkedIn is designed to be more professional than other social media platforms and is geared toward businesses and professionals. Users create profiles similar to resumes, and companies can create pages that showcase their business. Because LinkedIn is a professional platform, it’s the best place to post job openings and information about your company culture.
You can join industry-specific LinkedIn Groups to ask and answer questions, which can help you establish brand recognition and bring users to your company page and website. Like on Twitter, it is best to have a mix of original and shared content on your page, so commit to creating polished, professional content related to your business.
TikTok
TikTok, the relatively new hit platform where users create and share short videos, can be an immensely effective option for businesses, but only if used properly. Because TikTok is primarily popular with the infamously discerning Generation Z, it can be challenging to strike the right tone for business success on the platform.
To use TikTok for business, you need a keen understanding of your brand and how that translates to TikTok specifically. Examine how other businesses are tackling TikTok before trying it yourself.
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