The Importance of Social Media for Small Business
You’ve probably heard it over and over, how important social media is for your business. Well here are some of the reasons as to why having those social media channels and making time each day to post on those platforms is so important.
Americans spend nearly a quarter of their online time on social networks and blogs. Chances are much of your target market is probably already using social media. If you want to reach clients and prospects, you need to be where they are and by using social media you’ll increase those odds.
Having a dedicated business Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and a host of other social platforms is a guaranteed way to:
- Increase you brand recognition: Increased brand recognition can help you generate more prospects and convert them into paying customers. Social media platforms will help boost your business’ visibility with your current customers and even potential prospects down the road. It gives your business a direct way to share it’s brand and content with customers. A customer today expects a business to be highly accessible and easily recognizable online. When they search for a business or product and don’t find information from your business, they’re going to assume your business does not exist and move on.
- Improves business customer service: Many of today’s consumers flock to social media to seek assistance, ask questions or provide feedback to a brand’s customer service team. Your business will miss those customer conversations if you not engaging on social media. When a customer posts their positive experience with your company, you should share it as a testimonial to all of your followers, and explain how others can benefit from your business.
- Marketing costs are lower: Traditional marketing such as print or digital ads, postcard mailers, etc can be very expensive for a new or smaller business at the start. While those tools are still important for your business, it is important to incorporate lower-cost social media marketing. This can stretch your marketing budget substantially. Having your best customer post to their Facebook account about the great service they received from your business can be more powerful than placing an ad in the paper. You can post multiple times each day on social media, for FREE!
- Boost your SEO rankings: Search Engine Optimization is something that often gets overlooked but is still a crucial part of social media. Search engines, such as Google, will consider a company’s social media presence as a factor in determining where that business will rank on a search results page. When writing posts on your business’ social media pages, consider ways that you can help your followers to spread your business. Perhaps you can do that by offering something for free or at a discount if the follower shares the post.