Although social media was once for just connecting college students to other college students, it’s become much more than that today. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and a range of other social networks connect people of all ages to their friends across the world. The difference is that today, businesses can use those same platforms to connect to those people as well.
Consider paid Facebook advertising for example. With a few clicks of a button, a business can setup affordable campaigns that target their exact audience. Facebook’s audience settings let you target the people your ads should show to with anything from their gender and age to their interests, education, income level, and purchasing behaviors.
Also consider that 78% of social media users are online to share knowledge. That means that your customers and clients are already using social media to share what works for them. With a little leverage and social media marketing, you can tap into your current fan base and have them share your business for free.
How Social Media Can Help Your Business Grow
Depending on the size of your business, and whether it’s a single business or franchise, you can use social media in various ways to promote your services or products, increase exposure, generate leads, and lower marketing costs.
A bike shop for example could encourage customers to like their Facebook page. Once a customer likes a business’s page, they will see the business’s Facebook posts on their Facebook homepage. A business with 1,000 fans will reach about 15-30% of them when posting at regular hours. This bike shop with 1,000 fans can now post about new products and sales, and 150-300 of those customers will be made aware of this information.
A dentist office could promote a giveaway using Facebook and Twitter, with a random person being picked for a $250 gift card. The catch is that they have to Tweet or post a photo of themselves doing XYZ, tagged with the dentist office’s name.
Using social media like this is effective because you’re essentially letting your customers do all of the viral marketing work themselves. Whether it’s by getting your fans to post about your company with giveaway incentives, or whether it’s growing a customer following which you can periodically market new products to, social media is really effective at growing your business.
Businesses that don’t incorporate social media marketing into their marketing strategies are at a loss because they don’t get to interact with their customers and clients regularly. Imagine a barbershop for example: someone could visit it once and then forget all about that shop. If the business was on social media however, and that one-time customer followed the barbershop because they saw a sticker on the counter that promoted the page with a giveaway, that customer is more likely to think of that shop, return to that shop, and spread the word about the shop and its cool giveaways.
Instead of limiting your business to one-time interactions with your customers, you should be connecting with them in the long run so that you can increase sales and exposure.
