Besides traditional and online marketing strategies, social media platforms can provide an excellent way for businesses to reach potential customers. For example, did you know that TikTok and Facebook have a combined total of 4 billion active users every month? That’s amazing! In more practical terms, this means one has the potential to reach more than half the people on earth today. That should be enough reason for any business to get started with social media. However, for our more skeptical readers, in this post, we will present additional reasons why you should use social media. We will also list the top five best social media platforms for business marketing we believe you can use. By the end of this post, we believe you’ll have a better understanding of the benefits of social media. We will also provide pointers on which platforms you could start with to promote your business.
Over the last fifteen years, social media has grown from a simple tool for connecting with friends into an ecommerce tool. One clear proof of this is the presence of all major businesses on social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube. It stands to reason therefore that if you want to grow your business, social media is the way to go. But what is social media and what benefits could it offer your business? Also, how does social media differ from having a business website and how much does it cost? We will attempt to answer these questions in the following sections.
Before proceeding though, here are some related posts we’ve written that you might find useful:
- Seven Benefits of Social Media Marketing for Businesses
- Seven Content Marketing Tactics to Boost your Web Traffic
- Does your Company need a Website?
- Five ways Brand Marketing will benefit your Business
- Twenty-Five Powerful Entrepreneur Quotes to Live By
- Five Advantages and Disadvantages of Digital Marketing
- Five Effective Marketing Strategies to grow your Business
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In the next sections, as mentioned earlier, we will explain what social media is and its benefits to your business. We will then conclude by highlighting five of the best social media platforms for business marketing.
What is Social Media?
According to Cambridge Dictionary, social media refers to “forms of media that allow people to communicate and share information using the internet or mobile phones”. Originally, social media platforms began as websites people could use to connect with each other. Examples of original social media platforms include Myspace, Hi5, Yahoo Messenger and Skype.
Today, the cornerstone principles of modern social media platforms remain the same: connecting people. However, in addition, they also include marketing, connecting businesses with customers, and transacting business online.
Reasons Why your Business should use Social Media
Social media platforms have become an important part of marketing for businesses due to its tech enabled activities. For example, companies can now use these platforms to engage with customers, advertise, promote products, and offer customer service. Here are some practical reasons why you should use social media platforms for your business:
- Increase Brand Awareness: First, social media platforms are an excellent way to create brand awareness for your business, products, or services. Also, access to the potential audiences available on these social media platforms, combined with marketing efforts could significantly increase sales.
- Quicker and Faster Customer Service: Another benefit social media could offer your business is faster customer service. Through these platforms, businesses can interact directly with customers and provide support for their products. As a result, social media platforms also help create customer engagement, repeat sales, and provide customer satisfaction.
- Increased Search Engine Ranking: Customer engagement on social media also helps increase one’s ranking on traditional search engines. In other words, increased interaction translates to increased ranking and website traffic for your business.
- Keep Track of Competitors: Another advantage social media provides is that it helps businesses keep track of competitors. Unlike websites which could be a closed book, on social media, one can identify sales tactics competitors use. Such information could help inspire one’s online marketing strategies.
- Generate more Sales: Social media marketing is cost effective and relatively inexpensive way to generate more sales, compared to other traditional advertising methods.
In your experience, what other benefits does social media have for businesses? Let us know by leaving a comment at the end of this post.
Top Five Best Social Media Platforms for Business Marketing
Earlier on, we raised the question of how social media pages differ from business websites. While there are several similarities, the primary difference is that social media pages are hosted on the social media platform. On the other hand, a website is self-hosted, with its own domain name, web hosting, etc.
Here are five of the best social media platforms to use for your business marketing efforts:
- Facebook: Facebook is the largest social media platform in terms of active monthly users. To put it in perspective, Facebook has over 2.5 billion active monthly users worldwide with 75% of them visiting daily. In terms of marketing options, Facebook Ads and boosted posts can be run for as little as $1 a day. In addition, such ads can be targeted to specific age groups, countries, and cities and even people with specific interests. As a result, Facebook is an excellent social media platform for business marketing.
- Instagram: In 2012, Facebook bought Instagram, a photo and video sharing app. Today, Instagram has grown to include support for ecommerce purchases for business pages. Instagram allows businesses and customers to share pictures of products, tell a story or create engagement among followers. Like Facebook, Ads and boosted posts can also be run for as little as $1 per day.
- YouTube: If you’re looking for a platform that helps provide customer support using videos, YouTube is the answer. Besides the fact that viral videos can also be monetized, the use of videos can provide clear support otherwise unavailable. In addition, Channel videos could also be used to showcase products, and available sales. Since YouTube is owned by Google, it also ties in nicely into other SEO optimizations to help boost website traffic and sales. YouTube promotions vary in price.
- Twitter: Twitter is another in a long line of social media platforms that could be used to market your business. Twitter has over 330 million active monthly users and employs the use of text, pictures, and videos for posts. In particular, Twitter text-based posts are limited to 280 characters: twice its original limit of 140 characters. Twitter also allows for real-time conversations with clients, customer support and updates and other notifications. Twitter promotions range from 50 cents to $2 per action e.g., a retweet or like. Alternatively, one could use Twitter Promote Mode at $99 per month to promote your first ten tweets.
- LinkedIn: Unlike other social media platforms, LinkedIn is unique because it is uses for business-to-business connections and professional networking. As a business, LinkedIn can be uniquely useful for building professional relationships with other businesses and colleagues. Like all other platforms, LinkedIn also has marketing and advertising capabilities that could be used to promote a business.
As an entrepreneur or business owner, what social media platforms have you used for your business? Which of them gave you the best results for your marketing efforts? Feel free to leave us your comments and thoughts on social media or at the end of this post. As always, we would love to hear from you.
Today’s Funny Quote
Our funny quote for today is by Wendell Johnson, the American Psychologist, Actor and Author:
Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use.
Did you get it? Let us know if you do in the comments section below.
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