Social Media (SM) is an established multi-platform way to connect brands and consumers, whether they’re old customers, new or potential.

You may be unsure of the value of social media for your company, and see it only as a source of frustration and an extra burden to produce fresh content continuously for these platforms. Concerns about putting pressure on an already stretched marketing team or the hard-cost of outsourcing SM strategy and implementation to an agency can make it difficult to justify internally why this investment should be made, and what the ROI will look like.

If you add in paid social on top of organic, this further complicates the question and may leave you feeling overwhelmed by the range of things to consider.

So we thought we’d make it easier for you, by highlighting some of the major factors that may influence you to invest in a social media strategy:

 

6 Main Reasons why you should ‘Go Social’

1. Funnel Development

While not every user who sees your company’s profile on social media will immediately become a customer, posting on social media regularly ensures that you are ‘top of mind’ for those users as and when they may require your service or product.

When we are willing to give a social strategy a try and objectively look at assisted conversions, user journey paths, and different attribution models, we see how social media has an impact in the conversion funnel.

 

2. Prospecting to new Clients

Compared to some other digital marketing channels, social can have a different type of reach. Google searches rely on people looking for what we have to offer when they plug in a specific query. Email marketing is limited to our existing audience unless we’re buying lists.

Every SM user is a potential client, offering businesses the opportunity to get in front of a larger referral audience organically when followers engage with content making it show up in their networks’ feeds. If your budget can stretch to advertising, there are also multiple options for sponsoring content and advertising that allow you to proactively target the extended networks of followers, as well as choose demographic and interest-based campaigns.

 

3. Reputation Management

SM provides a common place for users to address any problems and brands to manage reputation.

The most common reason why consumers reach out to brands on social media is because they have a question. 57% of consumers reported doing this. The second most common reason is to have an issue with a product or service resolved. 45% of consumers have done this.

A fair amount of people (34%) also reach out to brands on social media so they can commend them on their products or services. Brands should use all of these interactions as an opportunity to build relationships.

If you don’t know what social media your current audience is using, you can miss out on the opportunity to leverage reviews for your benefit. And, if you have a negative review posted through SM, by not being there, you’ll miss the opportunity to respond to and address the matter in a professional way, to maintain the reputation your company deserves.

 

4. PR

Social media is a great vehicle for disseminating important company news and messages. LinkedIn allows for more professional and press release-like communications, but it’s not just about ‘corporate’ feeling content; you can leverage many social networks to get positive news out to customers, prospects, and stakeholders about what the company is doing beyond making a profit.

LinkedIn performs 277% betterthan Facebook and Twitter when it comes to generating visitor-to-lead conversions, and 80% of social media B2B leadscome from LinkedIn.

 

5. SEO

High social media engagement rates will also improve other aspects of a brand’s performance – it can help with your SEO strategy. Not only will it increase your online visibility, but any links from your social media accounts back to your website are called ‘do follow’ links and are crawled by search engines. This means that regular updates and links back to your website should move your website up the Search Engine Rankings.

 

6. Gaining Industry Insight

By monitoring your competitors, using social listening tools to keep tabs on shifts in your audience, and staying engaged as individuals and companies, we can gain insights which will influence further marketing strategy, including with content production and product decisions.

 

 

As part of a structured online strategy, Austin Marketing can help you navigate this maze with ease. Whilst being a fast and efficient way of reaching your target audience, digital marketing is also easily amendable and lower cost than many other traditional strategies.

It is the most measurable form of marketing out there, giving us clear results to share with you, showing how your business is performing and how we can help you improve it even further. Why not get in contact with us?

 

Stats from https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-statistics/