Many business owners have heard of the power of social media. Yes, they know it has been used extensively by politicians. They know governments have been toppled by conversations that started on social networks. However, many of them don’t realize the power that is waiting to be unleashed in their business if they use social media right. Here are just a few…
1. Raise Brand Awareness
The brands that have a strong presence on social networks take up a stronger position in people’s minds. Facebook, for example, has hit a billion users globally. What does this mean for your business? You can easily build a strong brand just by taking advantage of this and other platforms (But that is if you do it right).
So what leads to this brand awareness? The increase in the number of mentions your business gets is one strong factor. The bigger factor is the number of positive conversations that revolve around your product or service. So make sure you get them talking about you. There are many ways to do this (But that’s beyond the scope of this discourse — Get a social media expert to help you out).
2. Establish Your Expertise And Credibility As A Professional
When people talk they show their ignorance, fears and challenges (among other things). Experts who engage in the various discussions going on (on those platforms) have an opportunity to establish themselves as experts by providing solutions.
If you can make out time to really help people out, they will flock to you (and tell their friends and followers). The more people who get useful tips and tricks from you, the bigger the followership you build. This establishes your expertise and helps build your credibility as a professional.
Many of those people will eventually choose to do business with you. After all, they already know and trust you. You are NOT a stranger. You are a friend who also happens to be an expert on the subject matter.
3. Engage Existing Clients
Leave your clients for long enough and they’ll end up with your competitor. It doesn’t matter how great your product or service is. It is important that you stay in their consciousness always. Social media provide you unique opportunities to stay connected.
You can tweet about the things you are doing. You can post a new article that you believe will be helpful to your clients on your Facebook page. You can pin pictures of the last event you held. Simply put: You can keep them engaged.
4. Drive Traffic Directly
Once people are involved on any platform and you are allowed to link to places of interest, you have new opportunities to drive traffic to your site. This is one of the big benefits many people see in social media. They can get many new visitors to their sites (and with that new business).
For example, imagine you’ve just posted a great article on your blog. You tweet about it and some of your followers head over to your blog and really enjoy your post. They like it, share it, reblog it, tweet it, retweet it and get the whole web (at least in your niche) talking about it. What happens? They all head over to your blog to see what you talked about.
Some will bookmark your page. Some will hang around and look at other things you have to say or offer and some will eventually buy from you.
5. Improve SEO
Social signals have increased in importance with respect to search engine optimization. The logic is: People are bound to talk about it on the different social platforms if the content on your page is that good. Therefore, having a strong social presence will help your search engine optimization efforts in a big way.
Better SEO means higher rankings. Higher rankings mean more traffic, increase in your authority level, improved credibility and much more.
6. Help With Reputation Management
One happy customer can tell thousands about how great your products and services are just with one tweet. But by the same token, a competitor or unhappy customer can ruin your reputation with a tweet. So you really can’t afford to run a business without a strong presence on these social networks.
While you don’t really have to do much when you see compliments flying around the web, you have to rise up and counter every attempt to run your business down. You can’t start when people call you names – That would be too late. You should have built a strong followership before anything goes wrong. If you already did then your followers will counter a lot of the bad things being said about you.
And guess what? It’s best for others to defend you when someone tries to pull you down. Just make sure you already have the right structure in place before a hater picks on you.
7. Deepen Your Knowledge Of Your Customers
The more you know about your customers the better you can serve them and the more profitable your business will be. Social media give you unique opportunities to discover so much about your audience or target market. All you have to do is listen to their conversations. Here are things you stand to gain if you do…
a. You’ll Develop Products That Meet Their Needs
It is one thing to have a great product idea but it is another thing to have a product idea that coincides with exactly what people need. You can trust your gut feeling or you can just pay attention to what your customers are expressing as their needs. Companies that build products (or adapt existing products) based on what they gather from customer conversations stand a better chance in today’s market place.
b. You’ll Be Able To Deal With Their Fears
People respond to their fears. They do everything to make sure they never encounter them. But do you know what your customers’ biggest fears are? Pay close attention to their conversations and you’ll find out.
c. You’ll Be Able To Provide Superior Support
Hang out long enough with your customers and you’ll learn a lot about what they hate about your products and services. They’ll also tell you what they can’t live without. All you have to do is address issues that they don’t like and make sure you don’t let go of things they really love — It’s NOT always what you think.
d. You’ll Anticipate Problems Before They Become Full Blown
Is there a glitch in your product? You’ll learn about it quickly if your business has an ear in social networks. You can sense the feeling and the direction of a conversation. So if you sense there might be a problem at one point or the other, all you’ll have to do is release a statement that addresses that problem. This will make your customers love you. How else could you know what they were thinking about if you weren’t interested in them?
