Social media can grow your business, but you must have a robust strategy and remain active to engage potential customers to grow your brand.
Social media has been a beneficial tool for many businesses. Local businesses use it to bring in more foot traffic and promote sales or appointments. At the same time, e-commerce brands and major corporations use it to increase their online visibility to boost profits. Whatever your social media goals, you may have noticed that it's better to be active than inactive on your chosen platforms.
Social media can grow your business, but you must have a robust strategy and remain active to engage potential customers. If you're not replying to questions, comments, or direct messages, you'll quickly lose potentially valuable customers, and it could result in a poor reputation. Of course, what being active on social media means varies depending on the nature of your business. Some companies find that posting every single day of the week gets the best results, while others only need to post once a week.
Whether you post every day at the same time or once a week to draw attention to a recent blog, staying active on social media can benefit your business in many ways. The benefits of staying active on social media include the following:
Social media can help you grow your brand by attracting more customers. The more interactions consumers have with the brand, the higher the likelihood of them converting into paying customers. Whether you have an offer or valuable information to share, social media can help you do it.
One of the most significant benefits of remaining active on social media is to increase web traffic. With social media, you can create posts to entice users to click on a link, sending them to a page or blog on your website. Of course, you should also invest in other marketing strategies to increase web traffic, such as paid advertising and search engine optimization (SEO). Still, social media can boost your website traffic by asking users to click a link that will give them more information about a topic.
Consumers don't trust brands and businesses like they used to. Now, they trust real people and won't believe everything your brand says about its products and services. Therefore, you need to make your marketing more humanized and less promotional. Social media platforms allow you to show the people behind the brand and promote its values and unique personality.
Humanizing your brand helps build relationships with customers to build trust and make them more likely to purchase your products and services. Showing photos and videos of real people can help you become more authentic while allowing you to share important information to convert followers into customers.
Brand awareness is the first stage of the marketing funnel. Consumers need to know your brand exists to engage with it and eventually become customers. However, engagement is crucial because it means you're building relationships with customers to build credibility and trust. The more engaged your social media followers are, the more likely they are to become customers and brand advocates. Luckily, calculating engagement rate is fairly easy. Social media platforms will tell you how many comments and likes your posts get to help you find more ways to keep followers engaged.
We live in a digital world, and many young people no longer want to pick up the phone to discuss customer service matters with brands. Instead, they may email you or use a chat feature on your website. However, many customers reach out to brands on social media via direct messaging. If you're not active on social media, you could miss these valuable opportunities to connect directly with your customers and answer their questions and concerns.
If customers are messaging you on social media and you're not responding or taking too long to respond, you'll lose them as customers. In addition, if a customer has a serious issue with your product or service and can't get a hold of you via direct messages, they may give you a bad review or begin trying to discuss issues with you publicly on your page. This can lead to a poor reputation, especially if you get bad reviews online.
Luckily, you can use hyper-automation to improve customer service on social media. Many platforms allow businesses to set up canned responses to common customer questions. In addition, instead of sitting in front of the computer all day waiting for customers to message you, you can set up an automation that asks them to call you for questions or concerns.
Staying active on social media typically means creating and scheduling organic posts. However, organic social media is becoming more challenging for businesses because platforms like Facebook have listened to users who want to see more from friends and family and less from businesses. Therefore, if you want your brand to get the attention it deserves, you'll need to invest in social media ads. Luckily, they're one of the most cost-effective digital advertising options available, and many businesses can use them to attract and convert new customers.
We've already talked about how social media can affect your reputation. Since your customers spend their time on social media, they may review your business or even comment publicly on your page with issues. Bad reviews and public complaints can affect your reputation, making it more difficult to attract and convert new customers.
Luckily, social media allows you to monitor what people are saying about you online and respond to negative posts to show customers you care about their problems.
You may already understand the importance of social media but need to figure out how to stay active when there are so many other things you have to do for your business. Luckily, with content management tools, you don't have to sit in front of the computer all day. Instead, you can create and schedule posts and set up automation that integrates with customer service and CRM tools to improve the customer experience from start to finish.