Social media proves to be a powerful tool when it comes to growing brand awareness. Besides promoting your small business, social media can help you meet several business goals.
– Attracts new customers: social media offers a place for your current customers to recommend your brand to their friends and family. Through leaving you positive reviews, tagging your business or sharing your posts on their feeds, your customers’ circle of friends and followers will eventually hear about your brand – and more likely to be interested in trying out your services, too.
– Keeps costs down: posting on social media is free. Eventually, you might want to gain new followers and expand your reach by putting money behind your social posts, but there is no set amount – it’s all up to your marketing budget and how much you’d like to spend.
– Increases your sales: attracting more customers and potential prospects through social media helps you generate successful leads.
– Improves search engine ranking: social media presence can be a significant factor to Google and Bing. So, the more you engage with your customers and share content on your social media accounts, the higher your SEO ranking will be.
– Offers a great feedback source: social media enables businesses to gain valuable insights about customer behavior and interests.
There’s over 200 social media channels on the internet. However, a few of them stand out based on their popularity and the number of active users on these platforms.
• Facebook. Let’s put it this way, If Facebook was a country, it would be the largest country in the world. With an average of almost 2 billion daily active users, it’s a no-brainer that businesses should have a Facebook presence. It’s great for sharing media content with your customers and updating them on any business changes, such as introducing new products, changes in store hours and upcoming offers. Users of this platform are between the age of 20 and 65.
• Twitter. Whether you’re announcing a new product or an upcoming event, with a few words you can get your message out. It’s also a free way to monitor conversations happening about your brand, listen to your customers likes and dislikes, what suggestions they have for improvements…all kinds of bits that you can use to make your business more successful. Users of this platform are between the age of 18 and 49.
• Instagram. This platform is all about visuals. It’s perfect for showcasing the creative side of your business. Besides sharing videos and photos, Instagram has introduced “Instagram Stories” which allows businesses to share visual content for 24 hours (great for promotion announcement). Users of this platform are between the age of 18 and 35, so, if you have a younger target audience, it’s better to reach them on this platform.
• Pinterest. It connects users together through shared interests like fashion, cooking, photography, crafting, wedding planning and more. It also allows users to save pins (media content which they find interesting) and add them to their customized boards. Users of this platform are between the age of 18 and 50.
- Linkedin – important for BtoB marketers, it offers the highest degree of professionalism of all the social media sites.