To communicate your message: With social media, the size of your followership is very determinant of your success online. The more your fans, the bigger the audience you are speaking to. This can be achieved by publishing content for free on your ‘wall’ or ‘page’, depending on which platform you choose. Also, promoted content allows businesses to push marketing messages to even wider audiences to increase your reach. With geo-targeting, you get a more effective way to send your message because you can focus your message on specific target audiences based on location, gender, age, relationship status, etc.
2) Learn about your customers: Social media provides a very effective platform to learn about your customers. You can quickly understand pain points and specific needs which can quickly feedback into your product, processes or campaigns. It provides a direct link to communicate with and get feedback from customers.
3) Provide better Customer Service: Because you have the opportunity to directly interact with your customers, you are able to provide more effective customer service to customers. It becomes easy to address customers’ issues before they escalate, provide answers to burning questions or just join in conversations about your brand, product or service which normally would not be possible, at least not in real time.
4) Generate Leads: Another benefit of social media is that, because they provide an opportunity to communicate, engage and market your products / services, they provide good opportunity to find potential customers and generate leads for your business. Imagine that you publish a communication about a new product on your e-commerce store (note: always ensure to put a link through from the publication to the actual product page on your site) and a customer asks a question or two about the product, you get to provide answers instantly and possibly drive that customer to your site to make a sale.
5) Increase Sales: For brands that have a big following on social networks, publishing content about new, trending or other great products can lead to an increase in sales. Marketers who are conversant with social media developments use the latest features to promote content and gain interest of their fans to continually make sales. Sending the right message to the right demographic is always important to maximize the effect of the campaigns.
6) Increased brand recognition: A major benefit of social media is that it allows businesses to build and grow a brand presence. If done right, social media allows any business to develop a brand quickly by adequate engagement through relevant and interesting content, responsiveness to the audience, timeliness and consistency.
7) Increase website traffic and search ranking: We have already established that through effective social media management, you can direct traffic to your website to make sales or achieve a goal. Another beneficial consequence of this is that you get to increase your website traffic (especially as you are sending good quality traffic to your website) and this will positively affect your web rankings and increase your search visibility in search rankings. The more social media shares on your pages, the higher you will rank in Google search for your relevant key words.