Why Social Media Is Important for Business Marketing

With 63.8% of the global population using social media, popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter offer businesses unprecedented opportunities to connect with customers. These connections help companies build brand loyalty and drive growth.

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The importance of social media for business is its ability to create a link between companies and their audiences, providing a direct and engaging way to communicate. It goes beyond posting updates, as social media allows businesses to create meaningful connections, promote their offerings, and gain insights into customer preferences.

It doesn’t matter if you run a small local business or work for a global brand, social media can completely change your marketing efforts. This article will show you how social media is changing modern business marketing, outlining its benefits and highlighting some practical ways to maximize its potential.

Quick Takeaways

•  Social media allows businesses to reach a broad audience, creating brand awareness and engaging potential customers.

• Active, informative profiles showcase expertise, building trust and credibility with customers.

• Sharing relatable, personality-driven content makes brands more human and approachable.

• Social media platforms provide opportunities for two-way interactions, enhancing customer relationships and loyalty.

• With targeted advertising and content strategies, social media delivers value-driven marketing opportunities even on smaller budgets.

The Basics of Social Media Marketing

When you use social media platforms to promote a business, engage with customers, and build a brand, you’re engaging in social media marketing. This form of outreach involves creating and sharing content, running targeted ads, and interacting directly with audiences to achieve your marketing goals.

Businesses use social media to connect with their audience in a more personal and interactive way than traditional advertising. When you post engaging content like photos, videos, articles, and promotions, you can speak directly to your customers like a friend. Social media also lets you showcase your products, answer customer inquiries, and gather valuable feedback.

In short, social media allows businesses to participate in conversations and trends, making the brand more relatable and visible.

Popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and TikTok provide businesses with unique tools to reach diverse audiences. For instance, a clothing brand might use Instagram to share vibrant product photos, while a consulting firm could leverage LinkedIn to share insights and connect with professionals.

With 5.22 billion user accounts worldwide, businesses can’t afford to miss out on the opportunities social media can bring. The importance of social media for business is simply too great.

7 Ways Social Media Can Help Your Business

1. Get Attention and Build Awareness

If people don’t know about your business, they can’t become your customers. Social media boosts your visibility among potential customers, letting you reach a wide audience without using a large amount of time and effort. And it’s free to create a business profile on all the major social networks, so you have nothing to lose.

Here’s a fact: the importance of social media for business is the attention it gets.

However, it’s really easy for a consumer to become overwhelmed on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms filled with noise from companies trying to promote their brands. So, how can a company create relevant content in such a crowded space?

Original content and quality design can help. Between GIFs, memes, Facebook Live, and more, a carefully planned content strategy can reach your intended audience. You’ll need to figure out what message your customers want to see, how they will identify with your brand, and what will get them to click on your post or comment on it to garner a conversation.

Next, you’ll need to define what you want to get out of social media to develop a social media strategy for brand awareness. Do you want new customers to discover your services? Do you hope to bring more local shoppers into your stores?

By keeping your strategy specific, you can determine which social media channels best fit your company and take advantage of the importance of social media for business.

2. Communicate Authority

Customers are increasingly savvier and more discerning about which businesses they support. Before making a decision, they’ll do a quick search to browse your website and social media.

Will they find an empty storefront or a rich source of information? Setting up robust profiles that you update frequently with relevant content will build your brand’s authority and make sure you make a positive first impression through social media, showing that your business is trustworthy, knowledgeable, and approachable.

Look for ways to demonstrate your expertise as a thought leader in your industry—like writing pieces related to your expertise or expanding on your company’s mission. You will establish confidence in potential customers by showing what your business offers and values.

3. Show Authenticity

Customers aren’t interested in businesses that publish dry, corporate-style social media posts.

Instead, let your brand’s personality shine through in everything you share on social media. What does your brand voice sound like? How does it represent who you are?

While brands need to be polite and empathetic to their audiences, finding a voice and taking a stand is more important.

Practice getting your tone just right, whether it’s casual and funny or formal and friendly. Be true to who you are, not who you think you should be. Followers want to see real people behind your social profiles. Show them.

4. Encourage Engagement

Sometimes, a seemingly simple social media post, such as one promoting a pair of shoes, can receive several likes, comments, and shares. People can even ask strangers in the feed if they have received their shoes, how long the shipping took, if they liked them, and other questions.

Social media opens the conversation for instant interaction, relationship building, and customer loyalty.

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Social channels evolve, too, constantly releasing new features. This rapidly changing environment can be intimidating for some business owners.

But remember: you don’t have to do everything. Play with new ways to connect with your audience, and permit yourself to learn as you go.

One day, you could post a series of Instagram Stories to give customers a behind-the-scenes tour of your office. The next, you could host a quick Q&A session via Facebook Live video streaming. Over time, you’ll better understand your followers’ preferences.

You can also create engaging video content for social media with a simple setup—good lighting, a smartphone, and a tripod. Do a test run before you go live to make sure your internet connection or hotspot has enough speed to avoid delays and interruptions.

5. Grow Affordably

Yes, social media isn’t a place to be overly salesy. However, it’s a marketing channel; you need not ignore the opportunity to make sales if it presents itself. Sponsored info on timelines, videos with CTAs, cross-channel retargeting, and shoppable posts are the mainstay of social media.

Marketing costs add up, and not every business can afford massive campaigns. But you can get a lot of value for your dollar with social media advertising.

Your business, regardless of size or budget, has an opportunity to grow your audience and reach your objectives through ads on social platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Even if platforms such as Instagram are primarily for engagement, there are ways to increase sales on them.

Most businesses are data-driven, but social media isn’t a set-in-stone science. For example, you can scroll by an ad with a picture of a huge scoop of melting chocolate ice cream topped with a mound of whipped cream. You may not think twice about it, but three days later, you may stop by Baskin-Robbins because you were craving a scoop of chocolate ice cream.

That’s how social media can contribute to the buyer’s decision-making process.

When building an ad campaign, know who you’re trying to reach and what goal you want to achieve so you don’t waste any of your budget on unhelpful advertising. Avoid overly salesy ads, and opt for content that educates or entertains (or does both simultaneously).

6. Provide Support

Social platforms have successfully broken down barriers between companies and their customers. Instead of calling a customer service line, many people now turn to Facebook or Twitter to solve problems or find information.

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Develop your reputation as a responsive, caring brand by offering support through social channels:

• Create a system for tracking customer comments, questions, and complaints on social media.
• Respond as quickly as possible to questions and concerns.
• Go out of your way to be positive and helpful.
• Listen to criticism and make customers feel heard.
• Know when to resolve public conversations in private messages.

7. Improved Search Engine Rankings

Social media doesn’t directly impact search engine optimization (SEO), but its influence on search rankings is significant. When your business is active on social media, it increases your online presence and drives more traffic to your website. Search engines, like Google, notice this activity and may rank your website higher.

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A key factor here is social signals—actions like shares, likes, comments, and clicks. These interactions show that people find your content valuable, telling search engines to consider your site more authoritative and relevant.

For example, a blog post shared widely on Facebook or LinkedIn can generate backlinks, website visits, and overall visibility, contributing to better search rankings.

Take a local bakery, for instance. Posting engaging content and promotions on Instagram boosts traffic to their site, leading to a higher ranking in local search results. This ranking makes it easier for customers to find them online.

Overall, integrating social media into your marketing strategy makes it easier to connect with your audience and strengthens your SEO efforts. The importance of social media for business isn’t something you’ll want to overlook.

5 Steps to Market Your Business on Social Media

At this point, there isn’t a single business that should not be marketing itself on social media. The opportunity to interact directly with your target audience isn’t something you can pass up.

However, many businesses throw together a profile haphazardly and then don’t put the time and strategy into prioritizing its importance and success. You must put careful thought and consideration behind your social presence and then take it even further with paid campaigns to generate leads for your business.

1. Create a Strong Profile

First things first, you’ll need to create a profile that represents your brand in a professional and engaging way. This profile starts with creating a username/handle. When choosing a handle, shorter is better, consistency is key, and getting your business’ name in there is essential.

Ensure your profile provides all the information needed to drive prospective customers, partners, and employees to your website. Include a summary of what your business does, some contact information, links to relevant landing pages, and anything else that could help your followers take the action you’re hoping for (i.e., fill out a contact form or apply for a job).

2. Get a Content Calendar Going

Keeping a steady cadence of content flowing from your channels is important. Create a calendar and populate it with:

• A blend of content, including promotions for your company’s events/webinars.
• Any major company announcements.
• Company blog posts.
• Industry commentary and thought leadership.
• Other content that your followers may enjoy.

You must figure out the best posting cadence for your brand. Some channels, like Facebook, tend to decline in impressions and engagement if you post too often.

Other channels, like Twitter, can see great success in posting several times per day.

Do some testing to find what works best for you, and check your analytics to confirm you’re posting during periods when your audience is active.

3. Be Social and Start Engaging

Once you have a robust profile with great content, it’s time to start engaging. Social media should be social, so interaction is a core component of any good social media strategy.

Make sure you monitor and respond to mentions and comments promptly. These responses are your chance to interact directly with your audience, so don’t let them down.

You should also build lists to monitor so you can quickly scroll and find posts to engage with. These lists can include partners, customers, influencers, relevant reporters, and analysts.

Find your voice when you start engaging, and be consistent in tone with both posting updates and interacting with your audience. Consistency is key to maintaining an authentic brand image.

4. Build Up Your Following With a Paid Campaign

It has become harder than ever to grow your following organically on some major social platforms like Facebook. While posting regularly and engaging with your audience is an ideal way to grow your following organically, it’s also best to give yourself a boost with a paid follower campaign.

A paid follower campaign can mean the difference between having 1,000 followers and 10,000 followers. It’s a worthwhile investment to grow your audience, given the time and effort you’ll be putting into your ongoing social strategy. A little budget can go a long way with a paid follower campaign.

5. Start Bringing in Leads

The importance of social media for business is in the leads it attracts. Now that you have built a strong profile with a robust content calendar and a large and engaged audience, it’s time to use social media to boost ROI. Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are great channels on which to run lead-gen campaigns.

Using each platform’s ads manager tool, you can create campaigns targeted to the exact buyer persona you’re after. All you need is compelling imagery, attention-grabbing, and informative ad copy, and you’re good to go!

It’s also best to add UTM codes in your links to track conversions in Google Analytics or whatever tools your business prefers. Alternatively, you can even use the conversion tracking tools available through each social platform.

Create Your Social Media Strategy

The influence of social media is immense, as it’s changing how businesses connect with their audience. It’s a cost-effective and impactful way to improve brand awareness, speak directly to customers, and drive growth. Its ability to facilitate direct communication, amplify content, and enhance online visibility makes it an incredibly valuable tool.

Organizations of all types and sizes have the opportunity to use social media to build two-way relationships with their customers, and Marketing Insider Group can help with our Social Media Content and Management Service. Reach out for more information or book an appointment to speak directly with our team.