Social Media and How this Helps Businesses

While social media is responsible for keeping many people attached to their smartphones at all hours sharing content both useful and trivial with friends and family, it’s also a significant business tool.

With over 40% of the world’s population active in social media – over three billion people – it offers businesses a very cost effective way to engage with a vast number of potential and actual customers.

This coupled with sophisticated point of sale methods means businesses can reach, engage, build a relationship with and eventually sell to a highly targeted market.

Levels the playing field

Due to its reach and cost effectiveness, social media makes it possible for smaller business and brands to compete with larger organizations with more marketing muscle.

Social media is more about building a relationship with potential and actual customers rather than the ‘hard sell,’ so businesses willing to make the effort to share content and engage with their target market via social media are gaining the most benefit.

Relationship building in this fashion is usually much less expensive than traditional advertising.

Targeted marketing

Social media offers one huge benefit; highly targeted marketing. With so many specific interest groups easily identifiable and reachable, it means more of the marketing effort is expended on people who could realistically become customers rather than a more scattergun approach.

Segmentation still leaves plenty of people; Facebook alone has some 1.7 billion users and is the second most visited website worldwide, so even a distinctly niche product should find a good sized potential market.

There’s also the option of targeted paid for advertising; on platforms such as Facebook, ad campaigns can be run to highly targeted groups of people. It’s possible to select people to advertise to using very detailed criteria so ensuring only relevant segments of a potential market are reached.

Building a relationship

Social media is all about people sharing content with one another, so businesses need to do likewise and not fall into the trap of doing sales pitches all over their social media platforms.

People aren’t really in ‘buyers mode’ when using their favorite social networks so full-on pitches are less successful than with, say, a direct mail sales letter or some on-page advertising.

Even advertising on social media is often designed to start relationship building rather than immediately pitching a product or service.

As these usage statistics show social media is prominent in many people’s everyday lives, so a business can put itself in front of its target market many times during a given week or even a day.

Social influence

A prime example of how social media can work for a business by sharing and the personal touch is through the use of influencers. These are people with a loyal and usually high audience who recognize them as an authority on something.

For example, a fashion blogger might describe the attributes of a certain brand they use or have been trying out; some of their followers investigate the brand concerned and start to build a relationship with it via social networking.

Sometimes a brand may seek out and ask an influencer to work with them and recommenced their products and services; other times an influencer may happen to naturally choose and recommend the brand.

This is highly effective marketing as it revolves around personal recommendation and people taking action (engaging with the brand) through being influenced by someone they know, like and trust.

Ease of building a relationship

Automation means it’s easy for businesses to communicate with their audience without having to spend lots of time on it. For example, on Twitter individual tweets can be scheduled with automation software such as Hootsuite.

Content placed on one platform can be easily shared across others through automation, and the rise of chatbots means businesses can have a dialogue with their audience without armies of real people being tied up on Facebook all day.

A strong marketing component

Social media is undoubtedly a powerful component of the business marketing armoury; it not only builds relationships with real and actual customers, it does it swiftly while offering many opportunities for a brand to become well known.