Benefits of Social Media for Businesses

And the tools they can use to harness it

In recognition of World Social Media Day, we thought it would be a great opportunity to discuss the importance of social media for businesses across the world, so without further ado, here are some of the top benefits of social media for businesses and the tools that can help them the most.

Social media has been a god-send for businesses, and now there are entire brands that exist only because of it. It has changed the way businesses communicate with prospects and customers, furthermore, it has completely revamped the advertising scene and as a result, businesses not on social media are considered invisible by most people.

Let's have a look at some of the ways social media can be a boon for entrepreneurs and brands.

1. Instantaneous Communication: No longer do customers need to wait for a customer service representative to pick up their call or answer their e-mail. Nowadays if businesses have social media accounts, then people can just comment on their pages or start a chat with them. This kind of communication enables businesses to have a conversation with their customers in real-time, and get fruitful feedback almost instantly.
2. Easier to build networks and partnerships: People have an inherent desire to follow others online, which in turn gave rise to influencers and thought leaders, who have dedicated followings. This, in turn, has enabled companies to directly link up with them and gain instant access to an audience that is already primed to react positively from said  influencer's and thought leaders.
3. Boost your profile organically: While Google has repeatedly stated that social media backlinks do not act as a signifier for a website’s SEO score, it has been seen numerous times that a well set up and popular social media presence has also led to a high search ranking score.
4. Super-charge your website traffic: Social media marketing can play an integral role in increasing site traffic. As people find your brand’s social media accounts, they can easily be directed to your website via links, blogs, and case studies that people can visit your website to read or download. This increases the total pool of website visitors.
5. Faster Customer Feedback: Whether you are a B2B company or B2C, you should always remember that in the end, you are communicating with a real, living, breathing person. And these days that person can easily find your business online and leave his/her feedback either on Google or your social media pages. How you deal with this person’s feedback with make or break your brand in terms of customer trust and loyalty. As a result, its important to always show that for your brand the customers come first, every single time.
6. Wow your prospects: A follow up on customer feedback. People today create their first impressions of a brand from the reviews and comments that they read online. As a result, if they find that your business has numerous positive reviews and customer comments, then they are more likely to seek your products or services.
7. Know and Track your competition: Social media allows a business to keep a finger on the pulse of its audience, at the same time, because of its open nature, it is extremely easy to track the moves of your competitors. After all if they came up with an effective strategy or content, then it is absolutely crucial for you to come up with something similar, or develop an improved version of the same strategy. It’s important to remember that no one is perfect and that your competition is your best teacher.

Understanding the benefits and utility of social media is well and good, but the best way to harness its full potential is by using the tools discussed below.

• Buzzsumo- This tool allows you to track the performance of your content on social media channels, without the need of visiting individual pages and looking up the data. Furthermore, it also tracks trending influencers. The tools enable the user to track the content performance by topics as well, this enables businesses to tweak their material and network with potentially viable influencers to improve their social media performance.

• Canva- Operating a social media channel does require the occasional creative, however not all businesses have an in-house team of graphic designers. This is where Canva comes into play. It’s an absolute necessity for small and medium-sized businesses. You can use its ready-made templates and drag and drop features to effortlessly create beautiful designs without needing any background in Photoshop or Illustrator.

• Todoist- Social media marketers work on multiple platforms and post content quite regularly, this can make it very challenging to keep track of what to post and when. Todoist is a great tool that provides a free social media calendar that helps users plan their content easily and enable businesses to build a great community with high levels of engagement.

• Google Trends- This is a completely free tool that lets users track the latest trending topics in different geographic locations. By keeping track of these topics, brands can increase their reach by piggybacking on top of these topics. However, it is important to ensure that the content being posted in relevant to the topic at hand and in good taste, otherwise it can backfire and create bad publicity for the brand.

• Hootsuite- Hootsuite has been around for years and is now treated as the industry standard when it comes to social media management platforms. Hootsuite allows users to schedule posts across multiple platforms. The tool is in the form of a dashboard and allows users to track multiple social media accounts simultaneously. This reduces the amount of time spent on opening, loading, and manually uploading content on different social media accounts.

And there you have it, a pretty in-depth look at the importance of social media to businesses, and the tools they can use to fully realize the potential of social media from branding, marketing, and customer experience point of view.

So get started today, a whole new world of possibilities awaits you.