10 Advantages of Using Social Media for Your Business

Traditional media formats such as television, radio, and outdoor can’t match social media on targeting and measurement. If your business uses it well, social media can increase brand awareness, drive qualified traffic to your website, bring in sales leads, and help convert those leads into paying customers. Let’s take a closer look at each benefit.

1. Reach a large audience

Billions of people use social media worldwide, and all you need to reach them is an internet-connected device. Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and LinkedIn each have huge audiences, so almost every business can now find its customers on at least one of them. The greatest advantage of social media over traditional media is its reach.

2. Identify your precise target market

Social media platforms collect a large amount of data on their users and use it to help advertisers show more targeted ads. This includes basic information such as gender, location, and age, as well as a wide range of interest and behavioural data. Do you want to reach 18 to 24 year olds in Mildura who are interested in live music? It’s only a few clicks away.

Aside from basic targeting, you can also target people who have previously interacted with you or your organisation. These lists, known as a ‘custom audience,’ can include people who have visited your website, people from your existing email list, people who have watched a video of yours, people who like your Facebook page, and much more.

Finally, you can create ‘lookalike audiences,’ which are much larger audiences with characteristics similar to a smaller custom audience. For example, if you have a list of 1,000 people who have bought your product, you could ask Facebook to find a larger audience with similar characteristics.

The cost of Facebook advertising will vary depending on your objectives and target audience, but precise targeting means you can focus your budget on the people most likely to be interested, which cuts wasted marketing dollars.

3. Monitor data and optimise ad spend

Almost everything can be measured on social media. How many people viewed your video, how many liked or reacted to it, how many commented, shared it, or clicked on your link.

The social media channels can even record the actions people take on your website by using a tracking pixel. For example, if someone clicks on a social media ad and then makes a sales enquiry on your website, that data is pulled back into the ad platform. This lets marketers track conversions and optimise their spending to get a better return on investment.

Furthermore, the algorithms of social media channels optimise your ad spend to help you reach your marketing goals at the lowest cost they can find. They have an incentive to help you, because the more money you make, the more you’ll spend advertising on their platform.

4. Grow organically

To be successful on social media, you don’t need a large paid ad budget. Many businesses generate a lot of traffic without spending a cent on paid ads.

The proportion of your followers who see your social media posts for free is referred to as your organic (or free) reach. It differs depending on the social media channel, and on most platforms it’s only a small share of your followers. If the first people who see your post interact with it by liking, commenting or sharing it, the algorithms reward that content with more reach, which means it is shown to more of your followers and sometimes to people who don’t follow you yet.

Yes, the organic game has become more difficult and competitive as more businesses compete for attention, but there is still a real opportunity. The key is to create an efficient social media marketing strategy that delivers the right content to the right audience via the right channel.

5. Involve your audience

Traditional media such as television, print, radio, and outdoor are ‘broadcast’ formats, which means that a small number of media publishers share a message to which the audience cannot respond. These formats have evolved to become more interactive, but social media goes much further.

With today’s smartphones, anyone can be a media publisher. In seconds, people can take a photo and post it on social media, and others can respond. This feature of social media humanises a brand by giving it a distinct voice, helping it build meaningful connections with its audience, and ultimately increasing trust.

Marketers can also use engagement metrics to improve the performance of their content. Tracking your Instagram engagement rate, for example, will show you what your followers are interested in (and what they aren’t), so you get a better return on your content creation investment.

6. Boost brand awareness

Search engine marketing, which is primarily done through Google, is great because people who search for something have a high purchase intent, which means they are ready to buy. If I search for ‘black Adidas joggers,’ I’m likely to want to buy a pair.

However, search is only useful if people are familiar with the brand. If they are not, they will not look for it.

Enter social media and its wide range of content formats, which can be used to first make prospects aware of your brand and then nurture them to become paying customers.

7. Increase website traffic

Social media is one of the most important sources of website traffic. This traffic can come from organic links, such as the URL on your Instagram profile or a link in the description of a YouTube video, or it can come from a paid social media ad.

Marketers can invite social media users to the next step of the buyer journey by offering lead magnets (a useful piece of content people receive in exchange for their email address) once they arrive on your website or landing page.

8. Create industry authority

Because of the speed and ease with which anyone can create content, you can position yourself or your brand as an authority in your industry. Are you an interior designer? Create a blog post about the “Top 10 Ways to Design Your Office,” a video about “How to Style Your House for Summer,” or a Pinterest inspiration board.

Creating content like this and sharing it on social media will show potential buyers your expertise and credibility.

9. Lift conversion rates

Before buying from a brand on social media, many people follow it for a while. They become aware of the brand and develop trust in its products or services through regular content. This process, known as ‘warming up,’ can lift conversion rates on your website once someone decides to take the next step towards buying.

You can use retargeting to increase sales. It means you serve ads to people who have already shown interest, rather than spending money on those who haven’t. Look at the Instagram feed of a friend of a different age to you and you’ll see how different the targeted ads are from yours.

At the end of the day, the goal of any business is to convert customers, and social media gives you the data to fine-tune and optimise your conversion rates.

10. Enhance customer service

Customers nowadays do not want to wait on the phone to speak with a company about a customer service issue. Social media gives them a faster way: a comment or a direct message. Answer quickly and politely, and other customers will see how you look after people.

Rock Solid Marketing offers digital marketing from our Mildura office, including SEO, social media and web design services. Contact us to learn more about how to set your business up for success.