Absolutely! We believe that having an effective social media presence can bring many benefits to your business. Here are 6 of our top reasons why you need social media for your business:
Provide leads
Whilst social media is not exclusively a sales platform, it is an opportunity to tell your audience about your products and services. Posts sharing an update to your product range or a new service your customers just can’t live without can generate leads for your business.
Brand awareness
If you’ve started a new business, added some new services, or are just looking to get your name out there, social media can do this. Paid campaigns can be targeted to specific audiences in a postcode, and a specific age range for example, allowing you to get your message across to the right audience. Brand awareness improves as you gain this audience and they start to engage.
Loyalty
Building a relationship with your customer base and potential clients is key to gaining their trust and loyalty. Sharing helpful tips and advice, or passing on the benefit of your wisdom is a great way to develop these relationships and establish loyalty. Eventually, at the top end of this, is when your audience become brand advocates and tell everyone about how great your service is, as well as responding on your behalf to any negative feedback about your product!
Customer service
Having a presence on social media has become a given for businesses in today’s digital world. Consumers expect that they can ask a question on your Twitter or Facebook page and receive a prompt reply. Enquiries about your products and services can be quickly and efficiently responded to and complaints can also be dealt with in a professional and timely manner in this way. A well-handled complaint can actually be a great opportunity to change the negative perception and make it positive. You might even have some of your brand advocates helping with this!
Website traffic
Having a social presence and sharing some of the great content from your website is a great way to drive traffic to your site. Your social audience will follow a link to your new blog post and spend time browsing your site or a new follower might click through to your home page from your profile. This all adds up to more valuable traffic visiting your website and seeing the messages and offering you have there. It’s not only great for increasing traffic, but every share and retweet helps towards your site’s search ranking too.
The competition is already there
Can you afford not to have a social media presence when your competitors do? When your target prospects log onto their news feeds and see the latest product form the competition, can you afford to miss out? For some businesses, this is in itself a reason to ensure they have social media. There’s also a second part of this reason – social media is a great place to see what the competition is up to and can provide valuable insight for your own business.
Still not convinced?
Sometimes business owners might be concerned about the potential pitfalls, like ‘what if people start saying negative things about us?’ or ‘what if we say something embarrassing?’ but with the right management and monitoring of the social platforms, suitable training for users and a clear escalation policy – these concerns need not be an issue. In fact, as brand advocacy builds, negative feedback can also be an opportunity to turn things around.
But, it’s not just about having social media…
This is all very well and there are lots of compelling reasons why your small business should be on social media. But not if you don’t spend some time on the strategy behind it and have a resource to commit time and skill to maintaining it. That’s where we come in for many of our clients who are busy running small businesses. We have the experience and expertise to make sure you’re saying the right thing, in the right place, at the right time and to the right people. We make sure your Facebook account isn’t something you post to only when you get time. We make sure that your investment isn’t wasted with no idea of what that campaign had achieved in terms of website visits or new leads.
Our services plan the approach with you, consider the channels, content and frequency required. We can help with the creative assets needed for engaging social media content, monitoring your channels and the resources needed. We can help define your objectives and measure against those to evaluate the effectiveness of your business’ social media.
Get in touch here to find out more about how our social media packages can help your business grow.
