You hear a lot about it lately. Many of your friends are using it. The companies you do business with mention it in their marketing materials. You can’t even watch the news or a TV show without some reference to one of the popular social media platforms.
There’s a reason why so many businesses are using social media now — It works! These are just a few good reasons you should consider dipping your toe in the social media waters.
1. It’s free (or almost free). It costs nothing for individuals or businesses to have pages on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. You can post text, video, audio, photos and links to other web pages and blogs and articles as frequently as you wish. The only cost you need to consider is that of your time or the staff you assign to it. It does take time to get started and you do need to invest time in it to listen to your audience and engage with them.
2. It’s searchable. Believe it or not, your customers are people and people use social media. They use social media much like the web, to find articles and information about things they are interested in. They perform searches on keywords describing their interests. If those interests involve your product or service, you’re going to want to show up in those searches. Some platforms are more easily searchable than others, but they all do have some kind of search tool that users utilize to find the pages they are interested in.
3. It can increase your web page search engine ranking. An important part of the search engine algorithms is the number of backlinks to a webpage. Of course if you have social media accounts, you’ll include your company web page on those profiles. Right there you have a backlink for each social media account you have. You don’t want every post to be about you (more on that in another post), but you will want to promote your products and services with links back to your own web page. When you do that, your creating more backlinks. And when your followers share or repost your posts – you got it – more backlinks. More backlinks means better rankings.
4. You can learn more about your customers/prospects. Unlike traditional advertising mediums, social media is interactive. You can learn from your customers and prospects. You can create polls and ask your fans to vote on product or service offerings, ask open ended questions about them, or their activities that relate to your business. Many times you’ll learn just from the unsolicited comments they make on your posts. It’s an invaluable source of market research. Did I mention it’s free!
5. You can manage PR more effectively. By monitoring social media you can keep an eye out for comments that others are making about your business. Rather than hearing something from an employee who heard something from a friend a few weeks ago, you can find out about it as the comment is made. And you can respond immediately to the person making the comment and in the same environment where all of that person’s followers first saw the comment. Defend your company, product, action, etc. when unfounded claims are made or apologize and make appropriate changes when claims are legitimate.
6. Your followers are the next best thing to qualified leads. People who follow you on social media choose to do so themselves. That means they have some interest in you, your business, your products or services or the information you’re sharing. As long as your posts provide value to them, they’re going to keep following you and get to know you, like you, trust you and buy from you.
7. Your competion is on social media. Here’s an exercise if you’re not convinced. Make a list of your top five competitors. Now search for each one on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. If you don’t find any of those businesses on any of those platforms, then maybe you’re not missing out on anything. It’s possible I’m sure. Still, it’s likely you could benefit from one of the other six reasons to be on social media.
If you’re ready to give it a try and don’t know where to start or how you’ll ever find the time, give me a call and let’s talk. I can help you with social media strategy, account set-up and account management and monitoring. Check out my social media packages at www.turnermarketingconsulting.com or contact me at shelly@turnermktng.com.
Why do you use social media?
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