Social media.

Why your business needs social media

If you’re unfamiliar with social media, they are platforms that people use to communicate with each other. For example, Facebook and Twitter. They allow you to publish different types of media (including photos, videos and text) for all of your friends or followers to see and comment on, hence the term “social media”.

Although social media is often thought of as a personal endeavour, it should be used by businesses too. Since today’s customers spend a lot of time on social media interacting with others, it is a prime location for reaching those customers. It also allows your customers to reach you via their preferred platform, creating a two-way relationship. If you aren’t on social media, potential customers will probably look for your competitors that are. The real question shouldn’t be about whether your business should have social media accounts, it should be about how much time and resources you will dedicate to them. Social media is simply a business necessity!

Businesses across all industries can use social media to promote their product or service. All you need to do is find and implement the right strategies for reaching, engaging and resonating with your target audience. Once you build a relationship with your audience, they are likely to become loyal, raging fans that often purchase your products.

There are three key reasons to consider using social media for your business: 1) to build relationships, 2) to receive feedback, and 3) to integrate it with other marketing efforts. All three of these work synergistically together. Building relationships leads to a growing, loyal customer base. As those customers leave testimonials, you will learn to understand them better, as well as how to use those reviews to improve your customer service (read our tips for responding to reviews here). You can then direct those customers from social media to your content on other sites, such as blog posts. Social media has become a part of the customer life cycle.

Here are our tips for using social media for your business:

• Choose the platforms that are best suited for your business.
• Keep a consistent brand image across all platforms.
• Find and implement the right strategies for reaching, engaging and resonating with your target audience.
• Post great content, and post it often (a social media scheduler can help with this!).
• Track important metrics, such as engagement and conversions.

A well-planned and executed strategy can result in engaged followers that promote your brand’s visibility and increase conversions. So, in order for social media to work for your business, you need a solid marketing strategy in place. Your strategy should include defining which social media platforms are best suited for your business (based on your goals and target audience), creating a customer profile (which outlines everything about your ideal customer, such as their demographics, pet peeves, problems, favourite platforms, location and more) as well as a competitor analysis (which analyses your competitor’s social media presence and actions). Read more about marketing strategies here.