Benefits of Social Media for Small Business

More people follow businesses on social media groups than celebrities these days. While a few people are checking out their favourite celebrities’ posts on Twitter, others are keeping up with Forbes Magazine, Neil Patel, and other business-focused sites on other channels. There are twice as many social media outlets as there were a few years ago totaling up to 3 billion users worldwide.

1. Growing Your Brand Awareness

Social media marketing makes it easy to let the world know who you are and what you’re all about. Studies have shown that consumers tend to buy from businesses that they trust and have a relationship with. By posting content on social media channels, your audience can read about your values, your mission, and the types of things you care about, giving them valuable insight into your company’s brand.

2. Gain More Visibility

Although posting on social media platforms doesn’t give a direct SEO boost, it does help Google know what content readers deem as valuable and relevant, which can help raise your ranking when people start visiting your content. Whenever you post something on Facebook or another social media network, you get a backlink to your website which helps, plus readers can consume your content, like it, and visit your website to find out more about you and your products or services. Increased traffic to your website, as well as high-quality links, helps you rise higher in the search engines.

3. Increased Website Traffic

Social media for small business is one way to reach a diverse group of people in a way that is personable, useful, and entertaining, letting people see that you’re a real person like them, and not a cold, distant corporation that doesn’t care about the real issues consumers face.

It gives you the opportunity to connect with potential customers you may otherwise not have found, that may be interested to try your services. If you begin posting real, thought-provoking content on your social media channels and interact with people who comment on it, you’ll begin to see a rise in your site visitors and more traffic coming in from different places.

4. Promoting Your Products and Services

You may have the greatest product since sliced bread, but if nobody knows about it, it won’t do you any good. You can write about the problems that your product solves and the benefits it offers users. Look at social media posts as an extension of your blog, write about how your products or services will benefit the community. Remember, people want to know “what’s in it for me?” when presented with a proposition to buy something. Answer those questions with your content.

5. Stay Fresh In the Mind of Your Readers

If you want people to remember you and something you said, you need to interact with them on a regular basis. It won’t happen if you just post one or two stories, blog posts, or articles and then never do any more. You have to stay on top of it and keep writing new content that your audience will love to keep them reading and visiting your site.

It’s a known fact that people who are active on social media check them daily to see what’s new. Many people get a majority of their news and entertainment through social media in the form of posts, stories, videos, and special event announcements. They may check their accounts multiple times per day to keep track of what’s going on in the world.

6. Source of Low-Cost Advertising

Besides writing high-quality content and responding to comments, many of the sites have tools you can use such as Facebook Ads to promote your business for a low cost. You can set a daily limit and run an ad campaign to help reach more people in your target audience. You can boost a post or run an ad campaign with a set $$ amount to run until it reaches the predetermined limit you set.

Paid advertising gives you the opportunity to connect with prospects that haven’t heard about your business yet. You can tailor your ads to appear in the search feed of people searching for the types of products or services your business offers. You can extend your reach to a broader audience to obtain new leads and followers for your business. This can lead to more conversions and more sales for you.

Social Media Sites Offering Paid Advertising:

• Facebook Ads
• YouTube Ads
• Pinterest Ads
• Twitter Ads
• LinkedIn Ads
• Instagram Ads

7. Uncover Valuable Insights Into Your Prospects

Social media is a valuable tool for gaining information about your customers’ search habits that can help you make better business decisions. Social listening tells you how your customers feel about your brand. You can find out what they’re saying about your business and answer questions they may be asking. One more way to connect and engage.

What do they like about the business? What can you do to better meet the needs of your target audience? You can help your business stand out in the crowd by knowing the answers to these questions and implementing them.

The benefits of social media for business are many. This type of marketing offers a lot of good benefits for you and your brand. It can help you engage with your customers, bring in more traffic, and convert leads into sales. If you haven’t created an online presence on social media yet, there’s no time like the present.

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What is social listening and which are the best social listening tools

Social listening is the act of sifting through all social media channels in search of mentions related to your business, brand, products, keywords, and competitors. The most important aspect of social listening is learning – analyzing the data you’ve accumulated and determining what actions can be taken. That might be responding to messages or completely revamping your strategy, or anything in between.

It’s important to note that social listening and social media monitoring are two different things. While social media monitoring tracks metrics, social listening focuses on what is being said. Think quantitative versus qualitative data. Social media monitoring gives you data, or the “what,” whereas listening gives you the “why.”

Why does it matter?

The phrase “social listening” can sound daunting, but in reality, it’s listening to what your customers have to say and adjusting to their needs.

Think of it this way: if you owned a bed and breakfast and a guest told you that the bed wasn’t comfortable, you’d listen, right? If you heard multiple customers express the same sentiment, you might consider making a change. Once you bought new beds, you’d listen for feedback to see if your customers are sleeping better.

Social listening is a way to do this on a grander scale. You can receive feedback from all kinds of people, check out your competitors, and track keywords. When it’s all put together, it creates a larger picture that you can learn from and act on.

What successful social listening looks like

With social listening, you can engage with customers when they leave positive or negative comments. By responding to positive comments, you further build that positive relationship. For example, if someone posted about how great their stay at your bed and breakfast was and tagged your business’s page, you’d respond saying that it was a pleasure hosting them.

On the flipside, by responding to negative comments, you can save the day before a situation escalates. If someone tweeted that your website wasn’t allowing them to book a stay at your bed and breakfast, you could hop in and correct the issue immediately.

This works on larger scales, too. When there’s a crisis or scandal related to your business, people will be watching and listening for a response from you. They want to see you address it and right any wrongs. Ignoring it will only negatively impact your reputation.

When you’re done reviewing your own socials, you should be checking out the competition and the industry. Track your top competitors to see what new products they’re releasing and what the public has to say. Then, zoom out and look at your overall industry. What are people saying they need? What isn’t working for them? Finally, take a look at your own offering and see if you can fill in any of that white space.

Four social listening tools to consider

Now that you know what social listening is and you’re ready to get started, you might consider using a tool to assist you. Social listening tools can collect data for you, so you don’t have to do the leg work searching for mentions and studying keywords. Here are our top 4 tools that you should consider:

Sprout Social

Improve interactions and simplify your experience using Sprout Social. Their social media management software brings everything together for you.

• Smart inbox – Aggregates messages from all platforms to one inbox, so you never miss a message. It’s built for team collaboration, so you’ll never reply to the same message twice.
• Brand keywords – Never miss out on a message that references your brand or products. Brand keywords run constantly and display in your smart inbox.
• Trends report – Check out the most popular hashtags, topics, people, and brands that are mentioned with your business. This helps to create better content and reach more audiences.
• Keyword report – Learn about the traffic for keywords related to your business, so you can track the market, check marketing effectiveness, and track your products.

Hubspot

Prioritize interactions and never miss an opportunity to connect using this social media product.

• Marketing campaigns – Build a campaign and share content from your blog or elsewhere to social media channels, all with guidance on when the best time is to post.
• Monitor social media interactions – Check for interactions from contacts from your database.
• Keywords – Create keyword monitoring streams that are specific to your business.
• Compare channels – Check performance from various social media channels with stats on visits and leads, so you know where to focus your energy and where you need to grow.

Hootsuite

Combine social media monitoring and listening all in one place. Simplify social media by bringing all platforms to a singular dashboard.

• Inbox – See all social media interactions, public and private, in one place.
• Streams – Hootsuite’s streams help you monitor and engage with people on all platforms from one dashboard. Choose to look at your posts and mentions, your industry, or browse all.
• Search streams – Choose hashtags, keywords, and more that you want to track. Hootsuite will continually update this info for you.
• Content – plan, create, schedule, and store content in one place so your team can collaborate and post with ease.

Synthesio

This free Hootsuite app helps businesses listen, engage, and analyze conversations across all social media platforms, as well as mainstream media.

• Filters – This feature allows you to segment data so you can find your audience. This includes countries, languages, sentiments, authors, topics, affinities, and more.
• Monitoring – Multitask by monitoring all of your streams at one time, in one place.
• Communicate – Assign mentions amongst your team and reply, DM, and retweet to Twitter, all from the app.

Final Thoughts

As more and more business is done on line, social media has cemented itself as an important part of any business’s marketing strategy. Staying dialed into what people are saying about your business, products, competitors, and industry is more important than ever. With social listening, you’re able to get more feedback and react faster than ever before. Whether you choose to use a tool to help you with that or not, you must incorporate social listening into your strategy to stay competitive.

Read also: Social proof in marketing – best practices and examples

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