Top 10 Benefits of Social Media Marketing for a Business

Ultimately, every business seeks growth. The question “How can I grow my business?” has been asked time after time. And very often, “Social Media Marketing” is the answer.

I believe most of you here are already utilizing social media as part of your effort of growing your business. However, I also believe that there are some people out there who still do not trust the capabilities of social media.

It could be your friends or your family members. Let this be the article that convinces them to utilize social media. This article can also serve as a reminder of the ways you can effectively use social media.

Social media marketing is primarily an inbound marketing approach, which many studies concluded that it is a better approach as compared to the traditional marketing approach. Learn more here: Inbound vs Outbound Marketing – Which Is More Effective?

Here are some statistics before we begin. According to Small Business Trends, social media has helped 90% of marketers to increase exposure and helped 75% of them to increase traffic.

Besides that, 50% of businesses that have been implementing social media marketing tactics for two years have experienced improvement in sales. You could be one of them.

Without further ado, let’s move to the benefits of social media marketing for your business.

1. Cost-Effective

Creating an account is totally free. Don’t we all love things that are free? You do not have to worry about financial risk. Social media marketing is considered the most cost-efficient type of advertising.

With good marketing knowledge and skills, you may be capable of building your brand online presence without spending a single cent. However, if you think you’re not getting the attention and conversions that you deserve, social media platforms do provide advertising service.

The service costs lesser compared to other forms of advertising such as television, radio and billboard advertising. These social media advertising services are simple to use.

Let’s use Facebook advertising as an example.

Boosting your post on Facebook

You get to target a specific audience by setting up some filters. The filters include:

 
By spending 1 USD, your estimated reach is 120 to 340 people. If you want to give their service a try, I suggest you start with a small budget first so you know what to expect. The advertising feature on most social media platforms is similar.

2. Reach A Large Audience

According to German online database company, Statista, the number of social network users worldwide last year (2018) was 2.62 billion!

In other words, 2,620,000,000 people are online. The number has been increasing steadily throughout the years and is expected to continue increasing in the future.

The number just keeps increasing… (Source: Statista)

Imagine all the opportunities you’re missing out. Having an online presence lets you engage with all sorts of people. There are many many ways you can use social media to your advantage but I can’t be listing them all here.

Here are two scenarios:
• You own a physical and online store selling sports apparels in Madeira. Your customers are only people who have passed by your store and people who have found you on search engine (if you’re good in SEO).
   
  Sports is practiced by many people around the world especially younger people who are tech-savvy. Why not grow your business and reach more people? With a few good tactics and tricks, you can reach tons of people easily.
• You own a popular local cafe. You get lots of praise and appreciation daily. Why not create an online presence and let people find you online? When you have a page or account, people can leave reviews and rate your business.
   
  People can also tag and feature your page, which helps you gain more visibility. Let’s say I’m visiting Kentucky next month. I’m wondering which is the best cafe over there, a simple search will show me a list of cafes with its ratings and reviews.
  

  Users that are on the platform can see your cafe, ratings, reviews and photos

3. Drives Traffic To Your Website

You may have created a user-friendly and attractive website. So what? Chances of people visiting your website by typing in your URL is low. Unless you do SEO or you’re in a niche market, it is unlikely that your website gets traffic from search engines.

So what is one way you can get traffic to your website? You got that right! Social media marketing! If you’re only focusing on your website, you need people to type in your URL or look up the search engine in order for them to know about you.

The social media platform is different. There are millions, if not billions, of people on the platform. People can easily come across your page on social media when they type in certain keywords or when other people shared your posts.

This is a strategy used by many businesses. The image below is an example of Adidas sharing on Twitter a promotional video of newly released boots. In the tweet, you’ll see Adidas added a link which brings their social media audience to their website.

Start bringing traffic to your website with this method!

This is one simple way that businesses can use to bring traffic to your website. If you’re interested in increasing website traffic, here are 38 more actionable methods you can use: Increase Website Traffic: 38 Actionable Methods For 10x More Traffic (2019).

Note: As the traffic to your website increases, you’ll get to enjoy higher conversion rates.

4. Keep Your Customers Updated

Social media can act as a “media outlet” where you provide information to readers (your audience) about your business. It helps to keeps your customers engaged with your business.

When people like your products or services, they usually “follow” or “like” your page. Or another way of saying it is they choose to stay engaged with your business. They would like to know everything that is going on.

It is important to keep your customers up-to-date. If your business is not on social media, how will your customers know that you’ve moved to another location?

People spend approximately 136 minutes per day on social media. If you’ve shared an update about your business on social media, they are very likely to see it.

In another case, Nike displays thousands of products in their retail store. If you’re a casual customer, how would you know which one is the latest release?

Nike lets people know through social media. Take a look at the Instagram post below.

New product announcement!

By posting this update on social media, people who have been waiting for this release can get their hands on it before it is sold out.

Remember this, if you are sharing a link on social media platforms, you should use TwitterCard or Facebook OpenGraph. People are more likely to click on them because they know what to expect. Here’s an example:

Which one would you click on? The one with just a link or the one with an OpenGraph?

They’re easy to set up if you’re using plugins. You’ll only need to add in a few details needed.

SEOPressor’s Social meta tags

5. Room For Improvement

Social media is a platform where you can get ideas to improve your product and services. Social media is a place full of discussions; it is a social and networking platform after all.

If you noticed, whenever people are dissatisfied with a service or product, the first thing they do is share their experience on social media, or some may directly post it on the business’ social media page. Here’s an example:

People like to share their experience on social media, be it good or bad…

That’s something we all want to avoid. There will be satisfied and at times, dissatisfied customers. When you get negative feedback, you shouldn’t leave it unattended.

Not responding to it will show other customers that you’re an irresponsible business and clearly not bothered by how customers feel. So remember, always respond to them and try to make it up to them. Appreciate the feedback because it gives you room for improvements. In the future, you’ll be able to provide better products and services.

6. Instant Feedback

Unlike traditional marketing which only allows one-way communication (businesses to audiences), social media is a two-way communication model. You get to communicate with people in real-time.

When your customers have any inquiries, you’re able to reply to them quickly. Just like e-mail. Except people nowadays prefer to spend time on social media. People tend to be more satisfied when their questions get answered quickly.

Check out Chipotle’s reply:

@ChipotleTweets just got home with our food wife opens up the large guac we got and it turns out it’s full of cilantro stems and half chunks of avocado that’s hard as a rock. Needless to say she’s very disappointed.

— Tyler Johns (@tylerjhns) August 1, 2019

I’ve got to say, Chiptole’s social media team is awesome. Most of their customers’ concern were replied in less than 3 minutes.

Imagine what would happen if you didn’t have an online presence. People would still talk about your business and you will have completely zero knowledge about it.

You’ll be missing out on chances to build relationships with people as well as room for improvements. If you have the chance to build relationships and improve your business, ultimately, your business will grow.

Get Your "Checklist to Increase Social Media Engagement" Now

"Great checklist, gives me tons of suggestions to improve my social marketing that I could never have thought of. I'm gonna work on checking the whole list off now!" - Ryan Godfrey

7. Virality

By doing social media marketing, you stand a chance for virality. Virality is the tendency of content to be shared quickly and widely from one user to another. We’ve come across content that has thousands, if not millions, of engagements.

Any strategy that generates Word-Of-Mouth may be considered as viral marketing. When you share a post, your friends like it and they share with their friends and then their friends decided to share the content as well.

As mentioned earlier, there are billions of people using social networks. All businesses, big or small, have the chance to be viral. But… the chance of it is one in a million.

Virality all depends on how Internet users interpret the message you’re trying to deliver. However, there are some tricks and science to it that will increase your chance of virality.

Learn more here:

• Viral Marketing Campaigns and How the Next One Can be Yours
• The Science of Viral Content: 6 Factors That Make Content Go Viral

8. Competitive Analysis

Or in other words, spy

Most of the businesses in your industry and niche are already on social media. In this day and age, businesses are actively building a presence on social media. Also, they’re more transparent now; businesses are sharing almost every information online.

To keep up with the trend and competition, you definitely need to take note of your competitors’ activities. Take a look at how they present their business, what they’re promoting and what they’re currently working on.

For instance, you’re in the cafe business. You noticed that your competitors have a few dishes that are well-liked by their online communities. You can then include those dishes on your menu.

9. Brand Positioning

Nowadays, people perceive individuals with many followers as superior. The more followers and likes you have, the more an authority you are. It is the same goes for brands and businesses.

Have you ever came across a situation like this whereby you want to buy something and you compare the brands by looking at their online page? And you usually end up buying from the brands that have more likes and follows.

This is pretty much the action people take in this era. Small Business Trends reported that more than 1 in 3 internet users say that they gathered information about a brand or product through social networks.

Perhaps, the likes reflect the brands’ popularity and quality. Also, in marketing, this is also known as the second and third step of the consumer buying process; information search and evaluation of alternative.

If your brand/business is not on social media, people will not be able to discover your brand. It’s never too late to start your business page, you never know to what extent they can help to take your business to another level. Start positioning your business!

10. Helps In SEO

Last but not least, doing social media marketing helps in SEO. Indirectly. We all know that backlinks bring traffic from one place to another.

As you grow your business on social media, more people will start to visit your website eventually. When your website experiences a large amount of traffic and backlinks, it tells the search engine that your website is relevant and useful.

As a result, your website will start ranking on the search engine for certain keywords that you’re targeting. It is the goal for every webmaster.

So, if you’re only working on your website now, why not invest some time on social media platforms which may potentially help you increase your ranking on the search engine?

Besides social media platforms, there is one short and simple way you can use to increase your rankings on the search engine. Consider using an SEO plugin.

SEOPressor Connect guides you to create the “close-to-perfect” content.

These SEO plugins provide you with suggested optimization such as adding keywords in your Images ALT and achieving a good image to text ratio.

It also lets you fill in metadata which gives the search engine an idea of what your webpage is about. Ultimately, the search engine will show your webpage when people are looking for that information.

Conclusion

We have to be grateful for the existence of social media. Social media has helped us spread our messages and connect with individuals with ease and for free!

With so many people being online, not doing social media marketing would be a huge huge disadvantage for a business.

I hope that this article has been helpful to you. I would appreciate it if you can share this article with people around you and leave your thoughts down the comment section below!

If you would like to read articles related to this topic, here’s one. Inbound Marketing: Attract Customers Who ACTUALLY Want To Buy From You

The article is as interesting as its name. Trust me. Enjoy!

Updated: 25 April 2024

About Vivian

Vivian is an anthropologist lost in the world of digital marketing. She has an interest in learning about the science of marketing and the creativity that businesses use to transform themselves into purple cows.