10 Reasons Why Social Media Is Important In Business

In today’s business climate, having a social media presence is fundamental to achieving your potential in terms of brand awareness, image, audience interaction, memorability, and effective marketing as a whole. The absence of any one of these attributes can be crippling to a business, so it is crucial to make sure that you are not falling behind.

Whatever industry you are in, you are sure to have competition that is looking for ways to steal some of your business traffic, making it essential for you to do everything you can to either keep up-to-date or to stay one step ahead of the competition.

Here are 10 reasons why social media is imperative to any business.

1. Visibility to customers

Nowadays more and more people are joining social media in one form or another. To maximise your customer reach and chances for success, you must be on social media. Having a strong online presence can vastly increase your audience reach and your brand awareness. The more people who continually see your Facebook posts, the more they will recognise your company’s name and services. In turn, the more prevalent you will be in their thoughts if they ever require the type of services which you provide. Also, if they are ever asked for a recommendation for someone in your industry, they will have your company’s name on the tip of their tongue. In short, social media helps you to become a recognisable and memorable brand to a wider range of potential clients/customers.

2. Accessibility to customers

Having accounts on a number of different platforms not only helps you to be more visible to potential customers, but it also helps them to contact you more easily. Being able to send an instant message to you, or being able to find all your contact information in one place will be a key incentive for customers to be more likely to contact you. If it’s too hard to get hold of you, they may become disinterested and not bother at all. It may appear ‘more trouble than it is worth’, especially if they have to get your contact information from another site.

3. FREE advertising

This is fairly self-explanatory. If you have a Facebook page with 1000 connections, and you are able to display your products to all of them through their news feed, you are more likely to get people to view your products, without spending a penny. Unlike with paid advertising, the people on your page have chosen to follow, so are already the right audience for your products. This is an added bonus you don’t get with other forms of advertising; you can target the right audiences more precisely. Also, you can publish content such as videos without paying for television distribution. In a nutshell, this is definitely a major reason to extend your online presence.

4. Greater insights

When you publish content on social media, you have more quantifiable data to analyse to see what is working well in terms of customer interaction and reach, and what you should change. You can view statistics such as users reached, the number of people who interacted with your content and how it fares in relation to your older posts. This isn’t always possible with other forms of advertising, so is definitely a benefit of taking your business online.

5. More organic traffic

The numbers of your statistics will usually paint a much clearer picture when you are using free advertising methods. When using unpaid advertising the number of people that have visited your website will be truthfully reflected as the number of people who have actually chosen to check out your website on their own accord. Alternatively, paid advertising could potentially paint the picture that lots more people have accessed your site for legitimate reasons than is actually correct. A large number of these people may be accidentally clicking on a pop-up or on the sidebar of their screen where your advertisement is displayed. This can muddy the waters of knowing exactly how many people chose to access your content and can also mess with your bounce rate (the number of people who quickly exit your page after they are directed to it), ultimately damaging your searchability as a brand.

6. Brand growth speed

Having an online presence in one or more social spaces is guaranteed to increase the speed of your brand-awareness growth than if you didn’t have one, and ultimately with a lack of an online presence you are going to have really low visibility to anyone in this day and age. It’s simple, people just won’t hear about you. Along with this, the vast majority of your competitors will already be doing more than you if you aren’t on social media, so it is really a no-brainer to have an effective digital marketing strategy. Social media will help bring your brand out into the public eye.

7. Enhanced public relations

Being on social media enhances your network of connections to new people and also helps greatly with your brand’s image. When people see your pictures, posts and personal touches on your page, it will really resonate with them that you are a real person with feelings rather than just a robot. This greatly improves your relatability and will make people feel more comfortable with reaching out to you.

8. Memorability

Allowing people to spend more time viewing your content (like on a Facebook post) is a great way to increase your brand’s memorability. For example, with TV advertisements, you have your audience’s attention for 20 seconds, and then they will likely forget about the advert and go on with their day. When someone sees your content and isn’t forced to stop reading after 20 seconds, they will have a longer time to register what they are reading and take it in/memorise it. Publishing online content which has no time limit in terms of viewing will give people a longer time to learn more memorable information about you.

9. Shareability

Social media allows people to share things with others that they may not have otherwise seen. This allows content to be viewed by more people than it usually would have been. For example, you could not share a TV advert with your friend if they were not present, as they would have already missed it and would have to wait for their next chance to see it. Another example could be with a physical leaflet; without social media, there would be no way for someone to share that content with others unless they mailed it to them or went and physically met up with them. With social media, content can be viewed on-demand and distributed quickly through wider networks than with any other advertising method available. This makes unpaid digital marketing both highly effective and potentially highly profitable, as the overhead costs of it are virtually nonexistent.

10. Potential for more interaction

Incredibly useful data can be logged from customer interaction through social media. Surveys, polls and questionnaires can be distributed easily and can collect useful data which can help point your marketing strategies in the right direction. All of this can be achieved without sending out any physical surveys, and if you offer an incentive, (e.g. a competition prize) people will be more likely to give your research the time of day. If a survey is digital, people will be much more likely to find the effort to complete and submit it than with an actual physical survey.

*Bonus section*- Backlinking

Another useful element to having a social media presence is that you are able to provide direct backlinks to your website. These can be included in your description, linked in your post’s captions, or you can request people to share your page or posts with a link to your website.
Social media backlinks are great signposts to your website, and the better your social media presence is, the higher your chances are of being found in the search engine results page.

Conclusion

All in all, online presence is very important to the success of your brand in today’s world, and with an estimated 49% of the world’s population using social media, it is becoming absolutely essential for any business, whether offering online services or not. Social media is an extremely powerful tool for digital marketing, and it is mostly free. It is no wonder that it has become so prevalent in the last few decades.

While cheap to utilise, managing an engaging social media account can be a tough thing to juggle along with other work responsibilities, especially on multiple platforms. Luckily, there are services out there that can take care of creating content for your social media accounts and maintain the scheduling and publishing of posts, whilst also interacting with your audience. Take the company I work for, Developyn, for example. They are experienced in this field of marketing and are currently undertaking the social media roles of several companies as we speak. Social media management is available as a standalone service, or is included as standard in any of our SEO packages, which start from £199.99 p/m.

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