Social Media has become a central part of people's lives in recent years and many businesses have realized its usefulness. The effective use of social media can be a massive boon to the growth of a business.Here's why:
1)It can create a community around your business
Putting your business on a social network allows your customers to integrate it into their own lives and social circles and this can lead to your customers spreading word around for you (this is frequently referred to as Word of Mouth advertising). About 85% of fans of particular brands on Facebook recommend those brands to others, and that should be music to your ears because about 77% of your potential customers are more likely to buy something when they learn about it from friends or family.
This works for a couple of reasons. First off, people trust their friends more than they trust ads. Every ad will herald it's product as if it were the second coming, but your friends will tell you about the things that they actually like. Plus, people spread things to people they know would be interested in them. For example, if you sell cakes, or something, and a person visiting your Facebook page has a friend who is just a huge fan of cakes, they tell that friend. Instead of shoving your message in people's faces and hoping they like it, your message easily gets to those that would really be interested much more effectively.
2.) It makes you more visible
Ah, the crux of online marketing: visibility. Being visible makes your business more prominent and gets you more customers. Social media is excellent at making companies visible. Facebook, for example, has nearly a billion users who send over 2.5 billion pieces of content to each other each day. That big of a demographic is hard to ignore and tapping into it can really boost a business. 74% of marketers reported a boost to traffic to their sight when they spent 6 hours per week social networking.
4.) Gets you feedback from customers
One of the best features of social media is its ability to facilitate communication. People can talk back and forth. What this means for you as a business is that you can easily tell how well-received your marketing is. If it was effective, and people will be talking about it, and you'll be able to see that with a couple of clicks.
5.) Target Niche Audiences
Because of the variety of tools social media presents people with, it's easy for people to form vast groups based on shared interests and if your company happens to coincide with those interests, then social media makes it easy for you to connect with them.
6.) Search Engine Optimization
As social media grows and grows it begins to effect search engines. It used to be that SEO would focus on things like website architecture and linking. These are still big ideas, but the role of social media continues to grow. Things like personalized rank results and searches that factor in G+ hashtag queries are becoming more prominent. Anyone that uses SEO needs to be aware of all the factors that play into it and social media is poised to become a big one.
One of the major pieces used in search engine optimization is link building. Link building is the process of getting people to link to your website (or in some shadier cases buying up fake websites that link to yours) to make it appear as though your website has a strong social presence. For search engines, watching social media in the same way that they watch linking serves the same purpose and is much harder to rig. By using social media, you are encouraging people to share your content among themselves, effectively allowing them to do link building for you.
7.) Build Authority
If you're an online business, you need to build a reputation for yourself. Nobody wants to buy from a website that might just be one guy with a beard full of Cheeto dust living in his parent's basement. Social media puts your business on the fast track for building authority. By building up a following on social networks, you improve people's perception of your brand, which can prove to be a massive benefit.
Social media is the frontier you need to tackle to assure the prosperity of your business. It is a massive demographic of willing customers ripe for the picking and you've got to jump on it before you get left behind. To learn more about how social media marketing is needed for business success then post your quesions below.