It is no longer an option to use social media for business. It’s a must-have for reaching out to customers, gaining useful insights, and expanding your brand.

What so good about using social media for business? Just think that we have over 4.2 billion active social media users currently in the globe.

You’re definitely missing out a cheap, fast and effective way to reach nearly half of the world’s population if you don’t include social media in your digital marketing approach.

Check out how social media for business connects with your target audience, engage with customers, and grow your brand.

Building your brand

1. Boost brand awareness

Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are obvious places to reach new and highly targeted potential customers, with over half of the world’s population using social media.

Do you believe that on social media, individuals only engage with brands they are familiar with? 83 percent of Instagram users perceive that the platform makes them discover new products.

2. Humanize your brand

One of the most important advantages of social media for business is the ability to make genuine human connections (a.k.a. Meaningful Relationship Moments). Introduce your followers to the people who plan your company and exhibit how existing customers are using and profiting from your products.

Authenticity fosters trust. As a result, trust increases marketing receptivity and generate new business. And social is the excellent place to get real!

Show to the world how your product functions, how you live up to your brand principles and how you prioritize the needs of your staff and consumers.

3. Set up your brand as a thought leader

While there has been a recent shift toward distrust of government, NGOs, and the media, the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer indicated that business is an institution with a 61 percent level of trust. People seek to brands for knowledge and insights, and there’s no better place to convey that information other than social media.

Whatever industry you’re in, social media for business gives you the chance to position yourself as a thought leader—the go-to source for knowledge on topics relevant to your niche.

LinkedIn Publishing Platform comes to mind when you want to set up a thought leadership.

Chairman and co-founder of Hootsuite, Ryan Holmes shares his thoughts on social media and entrepreneurship on LinkedIn where he has over 1.7 million followers.

4. Remain top of mind

According to Pew Research Center study in 2021, 70% of social media users log into their accounts at least once each day, and many people (49%) admit to monitoring social media numerous times per day.

Every time your fans and followers check in to social media, you have the opportunity to interact with them. Keep your social postings amusing and educational, and your followers will be happy to see fresh content in their feeds, keeping you top of mind, so you’re the first place they think of when they’re ready to purchase.

Of course, this does not imply that you must be glued to your accounts at all times. If you have a scheduling tool, for example Hootsuite, the platform can assist you in planning your social media content ahead of time.

Social media for business growth

5. Boost website traffic

Posts and ads on social media are effective strategies to drive traffic to your website. Sharing outstanding content from your blog or website to your social media channels is a great method to gain viewers as soon as a new post is published. (tracking tags from UTM should be utilized in order to collect statistics on click-throughs!)

For example, Architectural Digest from Instagram displays Story content in its feed before they direct their followers to a “link in bio” that allows their followers to check out the full story and get to see more lovely photos.

Participating in social chats can also help you get awareness, attract new followers, demonstrate your expertise, and drive traffic to your website. But be sure to suggest genuine value in addition to self-promotion!

Also, have your website address in all of your social media profiles because this is easier than people can learn more about you with just a single click.

6. Collect leads

Potential customers can express interest in your social media for business and products through social media in a simple and low-commitment method. There are numerous social networks that have formats for advertising because it tends to capture leads. When we have lead generation, it is beneficial for company’s social media.

McCarthy and Stone, for example, used Facebook lead ads to allow those who were interested in learning more about their real estate projects with only a few taps.

The advertising generated 4.3 times more sales leads than the previous year at a cost that was two times less than more traditional digital prospecting campaigns with real estate ads.

7. Increase sales

Your accounts on social media are a vital part of your sales funnel, which includes the activity in converting a new contact into a customer. (Warning: this is referred to as social selling!)

Social networks have become increasingly important to discover product and online sales as number of social media for business users keeps increasing and social sales tools expand. The time has come to link your social marketing activities to your sales goals.

Social media for content creation and distribution

8. Promote content

Using social media to promote your content is a terrific method to get your smart, well-researched information in front of new people, demonstrating your knowledge and expanding your audience. In fact, it is how things work in social media for business

Hootsuite, for example, used a series of infographics to share exciting facts and stats from their newest Digital 2021 global report with their Twitter audience.

Make sure you have a content marketing plan in place to get the most out of social media for business.

9. Make it viral

Your content is exposed to new audiences—their friends and followers—as people like, comment, and share your social postings. This is the concept to make your content becomes viral.

Your content spreads over the internet as people share it with their networks, and their networks follow your suit, potentially resulting in thousands or even millions of shares.

The valuable exposure of sharing somehow functions as pre-screening. Of course, going viral is never easy because it can’t be done without social media.

Being on social media for business also means that your followers can assist you in achieving your goal. For example, one TikTok user choreographed a dance routine for Grammarly’s YouTube ad audio, sparking a trend of 100,000+ users doing the same.

10. Source the content

2 key ways businesses can source content on social media:

1. Source ideas: To come up with ideas for content you can develop yourself, ask your audience what they want or engage in social listening. Put simply: Give people what they’re asking for. It’s a guaranteed technique to produce content that people want to read and share.
2. Source material for postings: To source user-generated content (UGC), hold a contest or utilise a hashtag. Engaging your followers can increase brand awareness while also giving you with a library of social postings to share over time.

Social media for communication

11. Manage your reputation

Whether you’re there to respond, your customers are already talking about you on social media. You and your team can pick up on important social posts about your brand and highlight the positive while addressing the negative before it becomes a major issue.

For example, some customers expressed their dissatisfaction with a poor customer service experience.

Is there something being said about your business that isn’t accurate? Be careful to present your side of the story in a respectful and professional manner. Is there someone who is singing your praises? Thank them profusely and draw attention to their wonderful words.

12. Communication during a crisis

When dealing with a crisis, does your company comes up with a plan? Though small businesses may have a smaller scale of crisis unlike issue with big company such as Starbucks but smaller number of shares can impact within the community or niche.

Silence is never an option when dealing with social media crises. Managing well-run and maintained social accounts, as well as having a plan in place, may assist when you’re there and ready to engage in the worst case.

13. Engaging with customer and audience

Social networks allow you to communicate directly with customers and fans, and it gives them a chance to interact directly with your brand. In contrast to traditional media, which only allows one-way communication, social media allows for two-way conversation.

You must be active if you want your customers and followers to be engaged. Maintain a strong presence on social media and reply to comments and queries in a manner that is consistent with your brand.

You can also utilise social media monitoring to keep track of what people are saying on various social media platforms. Burger King not only tweets, but it also responds to those who mention BK.

14. Good customer service and customer support

People expect brands to be available on social media and to utilize their social accounts for customer service — and more than half of social media users expect brands to respond within three hours.

Using the right tools, social customer service can work alongside the traditional one. You can try customer service platforms to help you manage incoming messages from social media, email, text messaging, and live chat.

Social media for gaining insights

15. Study your customers

Social media has a massive amount of data on your customers. You can utilize that data to make more strategic business decisions.

Statistics from social media for business platforms display data including demographic about the people that engage with your account. This might assist you in better tailoring your social media marketing strategy to communicate directly to your target audience.

There’s no reason to be in the dark about your customers and social followers when we’ve prepared comprehensive guidelines on how to use analytics on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Snapchat, and Pinterest.

16. Keep a close eye on your competitors.

It is vital to know what others opinions about your rivals.

For example, tracking competitor mentions may indicate pain points with their products or services that you may reach out to address, resulting in winning new consumers.

You’ll also be informed when your competitors debut new items, conduct discounts, or release new reports or data if you monitor them on social media.

17. Remain on top of industry news

Everything progress fast in the online world, and you can’t allow yourself to be left behind. Keeping a virtual ear to the ground through social listening is a method to remain informed on potential developments in your industry that may affect the way you manage social media for business.

Social media for advertising

18. Advertisements that are targeted to certain audiences

Social media advertising is a low-cost approach to promote your business and distribute content. In addition, they have advanced targeting tools, providing a chance to reach the ideal audience while maximizing your expenditure.

Marketers need to understand the value of social media for business. By 2022, advertisers are anticipated to spend more than $56 billion on social media product promotion.

You may construct customized messages that best speak to different groups of potential buyers using ad targeting options such as demographic information, geography, language, and even online behaviours. You just need to pay for the viewers you want to reach.

19. Target again

Almost 70% of online shopping carts are left abandoned.

People who have left things in their shopping cart are good candidates for becoming customers. They’ve already found your website, looked through your products, and decided what they want. Shopping carts are abandoned for a number of reasons, but someone who has exhibited this level of interest in your brand should not be overlooked.

Utilizing monitoring tools like the Facebook pixel, you may display these potential buyers social media for business ads for the precise products they have explored on your website or added to their shopping cart.

Social Media for proving ROI

20. Analytics and reporting

It is always a challenge for marketers to see whether their investment can prove return. You can observe the whole impact of your social media actions, from following to engagements to purchases, with social media tracking and analytics tools.

For both organic and paid social media campaigns, tools like Google Analytics and Hootsuite Impact measure website traffic produced from social media, conversions, email sign-ups, and ROI.

UTM parameters are another useful tracking technique for determining which social networks are most beneficial to your business.