10 benefits of social media for business

Sahail Ashraf posted on 17 April 2023

We all know social media is important for business, but every now and then we need to be reminded why it is important. Check out this list for a refresher.

While it may be difficult to remember a time when social media wasn’t around, it’s even more challenging to imagine a business not using it. It is a great and very powerful way to market a business and its products and services. And it’s largely inexpensive too. Let’s take a look at 10 benefits of social media for business.

Brand as thought leader

What a lot of brands find useful is the ability to use social media for thought leadership. This is where your content on social media is seen as part of a valued industry voice. If this part is done well, you will find that your customers will come to find you, will develop trust in you, and stay loyal to your brand. 

It’s all about developing that thought leader position. If you understand the industry that you work in well enough, you should be able to offer key information and insight to your readership. Social media is a great place to do this and the process is a powerful way to market your brand.

Top tip: It’s important to make your thought leadership pieces actionable. There is a lot of content out there. 

‘In a post-truth era, 73% of thought leaders plan to cut through the noise by making their content highly actionable…’ Thinkers360.com

Being there

It’s easy to fall out of the habit of being on social media, but the benefits of being there are tremendous. 

If you have a strong strategy, backed up by a robust posting schedule, then you will stay top of mind for your potential clients and your audience in general. If you’re ever tempted to miss a post or to not produce your best content, just think about how many times your average customer checks their social feeds every day.

Traffic

Whether you have a website or an offer page you need people to go to, social media marketing can drive the right people there. This is an important part of social for business, and if it is done right, can be a huge component of your overall strategy.

This is why brands put so much effort into socialising in the first place. It is a huge driver of traffic. And the content you create for social can prime audiences for an offer. In other words, great social media content can be part of your overall business growth strategy. 

This leads us into…leads.

Lead generation

Lead generation is such a huge part of social media marketing that companies like Facebook and TikTok generate templates for your posts that can help to push buyers down the sales funnel. 

You can nurture leads via your content, so that by the time they get to the offer, they are already showing interest and close to decision-making. 

UGC = loyalty and growth

Encouraging and helping your audience to make content for your social media is incredibly useful for brands. This is called UGC (user generated content) and it means that you will have content made for you, helping to fill your feed and therefore grow as people engage and share.

For example, running a contest where your audience has to create a short video for your account, with the possibility of winning a prize, makes it a ‘win-win’ for both sides.  You increase the connection and loyalty with a customer and you get more content, which means growth for your account.

The best example in recent times? The Share a Coke campaign.

Your customers and their satisfaction

Before social media, if a customer had a complaint they would write, call or visit you. When social media arrived, it soon became clear that the distance between brand and customer was shrinking rapidly.

If a customer doesn’t like the way you handled their order in your restaurant, they can just head onto any social media platform (Twitter is quite popular for customer complaints) and tell all their Followers and Friends about it. Within seconds, there could be plenty of sharing and commenting and then your reputation is damaged.

Using social media, you can listen and act upon complaints (and compliments), helping customers and managing their satisfaction. Businesses that aren’t practising ‘social listening’ today could face huge problems tomorrow.

Finding the pain points

When you use social media as a business, you have an excellent opportunity to find and act upon the pain points your customers have. 

By monitoring your competitors and the social media content they produce, you can see what resonates within your shared customer base. And if your competitors have complaints on their feeds about things they aren’t doing right, you will be able to adapt your offering so it does that thing right. 

Advertising that is targeted

One of the most obvious advantages of social media for businesses is the advertising aspect. You can create ads on social media that benefit from precise targeting. This laser focus in targeting has been one of the key features of social media advertising ever since Facebook started to gather huge amounts of data.

That data is used to identify potential customers for your products and services. Then the ads you produce through social media are primed to reach them at the right time and at the right point in the customer journey. 

Content promotion

Going back to that thought leadership idea, you can use social media to point your audiences to your very best content. When you’re creating content that is useful and original, you need to make sure enough people see it.

This is where social media comes in. By creating posts that tease the bigger and more detailed content on your website, for example, you will have a marketing engine that builds that brand voice and displays true thought leadership.

Brand perception

Finally, there is one key aspect of social media for business that can’t be ignored.

If your brand is not on social media, creating high quality content and engaging with customers, you will soon see some negative effects. These days, people expect to see brands on social media. It is the modern equivalent of having a busy store on the high street. If you’re not on social media, you’re not open for business.

If you’re in social media marketing you need the tools to do the job right. Try Locowise for access to the data you need to make a real difference in your industry.