Social Media play such a major role in business marketing these days; the majority of businesses are now using social media to promote their company and to advertise their products. Businesses that do not participate or involved themselves in social media would potentially lose the customer as the business will lose the opportunity in building a relationship with customers online which could cause businesses to be in the blind spot position in the market and lose the opportunity to create awareness for their brands.
Nowadays, no matter if you run a small business or just a big national company, social media is needed as a part of your business. Social media helps business to connect with customers, increases awareness of the brand and boost up sales. More than Three billion people across the world are now using social media on a daily basis and 52% of social media marketers believes that social media has a positive effectfor the company in increasing sales and revenue.
Benefits of Social Media for Business
- Boost and Create Brand Awareness
- Lower ads costs
- Attracting customers
- Real time performance analysis
- Networking
- Brand development
- Revenue
Every business now these days need to use social media channels as much as possible, the more channels they use, the more benefits they’ll get. Business these days are now targeting audience from the most uses social media platforms for their social media marketing such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, etc. Choosing the right social media platforms is also important for business as based on different factors such as the type of business run in the market, how many target audience does the business want to reach, how well can the business monitor the social media for the business, etc. Here are some of the social media platforms as a guide to choose whether it’s suits your business or not.
Facebook is one of the best social media platforms right now on for businesses for the company to reach out to their target market. Facebook is the world’s largest social media platform with the diversity of the audience; Facebook has a combination of all age users from 13 to 65 older or maybe older in both female and males. Facebook has its unique features that offer to business which is Facebook ads, with this features it allows business to target their audience easily as once you have visited the individual website, data will get stored, and the advertisements of the site you’ve visited will pop up on your feeds. In doing this Facebook makes it easy for the business to have their ads appear on customers newsfeed which creates brand awareness and also making it for the customer to make purchases through Facebook just a few clicks. Facebook also allows business to interact with customers through Facebook Messenger which give the business the opportunity to provide information about shipping update and other notification through the Facebook platform.
Instagram
Instagram is also one of the popular social media platforms that have many active users across the world. Instagram is a unique social media platform that more focused on visual presentation in both images and video, no matter what company Instagram can be the showcase for the product. One of the interesting features on Instagram that can be useful for business in social media marketing is the Instagram stories, which allows business to announce important news and updates through live video with their followers. Similarly, to Facebook, Instagram also allows users to direct message to each other directly, this gives an opportunity for business to provide customer service to their clients in the way that it allows business to answer questions and address concerns to customers directly.
YouTube
Second place after Google, YouTube become the second largest search by users on the Internet. YouTube allows business to post an unlimited amount of video without having to pay for it which help business in saving cost and also allows business to reach out to the audience from all over the world. It is accessible for both company and customers to have access to the videos as it is searchable in both YouTube and Google. 74% of YouTube users have searched to watch brand channels weekly, and 63% of users have taken actions based on a brand or creator video on YouTube. These give the opportunity for business to engage the audience to watch the video and opportunity to present their brand creatively.
Source: ‘The YouTube Generation Study”
Twitter is one of the social media platforms after Facebook, as nearly the same amount of users as Facebook this make it advantage for business to share updates and become part of the online conversation surrounding the company. Business can use Twitter to reach out to their audience. Hashtags allow business to follow up with what society thinks or says about the company and also allows the company to participate in the conversation about the trending topic in the company as well. Twitter has its feature for the business to promote their account and option to promote some certain trend that company might want to speak out, this offers advertising opportunitiesfor business to attract their target customers on social media.
Alicha's blog 
Hi Alicha,
Social media is definitely the forefront of a company’s position in the market, as its a place where we can promote our product to a larger target market and also connect with our customers as well, thus gaining more exposure for the brand name. Without using any social media platforms companies will fall behind in the market, as many customers will have not known about the brand, which won’t allow the potential for the company to grow. It is crucial for the business to at least have one or all social media accounts as like you mentioned in your blog, since it is an important factor to gain the consumers interest since it will valuable for the company to be successful in the long run. A very insightful blog post that is relevant to todays society.
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Hi Madeline,
Thank you so much for your comment.
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This is a really good blog. And yes, promoting business on social media is really a common strategy nowadays. Like u discussed above, regardless of business size social media is unavoidable. Furthermore, even business like drop shipping promote online since it costs much less than advertising on TV. Every blog of yours is fascinating, I would definitely like to read more.
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Hey Alicha
I also believe that social media is an extremely powerful tool for businesses today. I do wonder when it should be used and when it shouldn’t though. Because not every business has the same budget or consumer base so using social media really needs to be tailored to each individuals businesses’ objectives.
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Hey Alicha, great stuff! I agree that social media is vital for businesses to adopt, especially if they’re targeting a younger audience. Social media gets people talking about businesses through sharing and user generated content of posts. However, one slip-up can also hugely negatively impact their reputation and the way consumers perceive the brand. What do you think are some of the costs that come with using social media for businesses?
Kristina.
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