According to a recent poll referenced in an article entitled “Social Media and the Evolution of Us” from the website Creative social, there are 500 million people using Facebook, 250 million people actively tweeting and 259 million monitoring their LinkedIn accounts. In most cases these are not casual users and the age groups engaging are wide spread. Due to technological advancements resulting in smartphones and tablets, no one has to sit down at a computer to use social media. People are utilizing social media all around us, all the time. If that isn’t reason enough to connect to consumers via social platforms, Shell Robshaw-Bryan provided these eight impossible-to-argue reasons for businesses to go social in a story posted on the site Social Media Today in early 2014.
1. Social media helps you deliver better customer service
Leaving customer questions to go unanswered makes a business look unprofessional and like they just don’t care, so it’s crucial that you are visible on the social networks that your customers are using, and that you are regularly monitoring all of your channels for brand mentions and customer questions.
2. Social media drives brand building & differentiation
Social media makes it easy to improve brand awareness and build your brands identity. You can effectively establish your brands personality and give your business a human voice that people can relate to. Connecting on an emotional level or showing some personality are both effective ways of helping your brand stand out from your competitors.
3. Social media helps you to manage your reputation
Managing your reputation online is a critical part of any marketing strategy and social media provides you with a fast and effective way to do this. When dealt with swiftly and sensitively comments and complaints can be dealt with effectively, this instant feedback demonstrates high levels of customer service and can effectively diffuse negativity and resolve any issues that the customer may have.
4. Social media helps increase trust in your business or brand
Seeing that you are active on social media helps to fill potential customers with trust, it signals that you care about your customers and should anything go wrong, that it will be easy to contact you.
5. Social media allows you to obtain real customer insights
Customer insights can drive the development of social media campaigns and shape strategic decisions, helping you to make your website content and product or service offerings more attractive and relevant to your customers.
6. Social media is a great way of promoting your content
Content marketing is extremely important, not only in terms of SEO, but in order to attract new customers. Help increase awareness of your content by posting and sharing it. Social media when used in conjunction with high quality content creation is a highly effective way to attract new customers to you and also helps you to build authority in your area of expertise.
7. Social media helps you keep customers engaged with you
Social media is a great way of keeping your business or brand in the mind of your customers.
8. Social media will drive website traffic
Being active on social media will help you increase the amount of traffic that your website receives. Successful social media activities will always improve the amount of traffic referrals your website receives. Social media as an SEO ranking signal is increasing in importance. Being talked about and mentioned on social media is a positive signal that shows you are popular and have content worth sharing and talking about (Robshaw-Bryan, 2014).
Whether it be Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo or YouTube, efforts and time invested in social media can easily be tracked and its results displayed by the analytics/likes function of Facebook, followers on Twitter and views via Vimeo/YouTube.