9 Reasons Why Social Media is Important For Your Business

Have you ever wondered why social media is very crucial for businesses?

Social media is no longer a meme-sharing platform. It’s a valuable tool for brands to gain rich insights, customers and grow reputation. 

According to Statista’s report, in 2020, over 3.6 billion people were using social media all over the globe. And the number is expected to increase up to 4.41 billion by 2025. 

That means social media has a great potential to reach a wide range of audiences all over the world. 

And even brands like Netflix, Apple, Amazon, and Starbucks are leveraging social media amazingly to drive engagement. 

Still, if you’re not using social media, let us break this to you – You’re missing out on many opportunities to grow your brand and stay at the top of the mind of your audience. 

That’s why to help you out, we’ve listed down 9 reasons why social media is important for your business and why you start utilizing it as soon as possible.

So, without further ado, let’s dive in.

9 Reasons Why Social Media Is Important For Every Business

1. It Helps in Branding

Branding isn’t about choosing the best tagline or having a great logo. 

It’s more about building a positive reputation among people. A reputation that’ll exist even if you aren’t active on all marketing touchpoints.

And social media is the best place to build that reputation. Don’t take our words for it; even the number says so! 

• As per a Hootsuite study,  90% of businesses want to build brand awareness through social media.

• 39% of consumers trust brands after interacting with them on social media. 

• After following a brand on social media, 89% of consumers will buy from the brand, and 85% will recommend it to family and friends. 

Having a strong social media presence can help you show them your brand is trustworthy. 

It lets you define who you are as a brand and be relatable. So, if you want to build a strong brand presence on social platforms, here are few ways you can follow:

Ask Questions

Before choosing the right social media platform for branding, ask yourself – Who is your target audience? What are the demographics of your audience? What are your objectives for social media?

Asking these questions will help you understand whether you’re reaching out to the right audience or not. 

Be consistent

We’ve said it before; branding isn’t a one-night thing! You have to put a lot of effort and dedication to have a strong presence. You have to be consistent across social media channels like Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. 

Not just your posts; you have to be consistent even with the logo, color, font, profile picture to win the game. 

Nike is one of the best examples of that. 

Instead of being salesy, Nike worked to make an impression on the audience. From their logo to posts, they’ve managed to maintain a consistent message across all channels. 

2. You Can Connect With Your Customers On a Deeper Level

A brand’s relationship with its customer doesn’t end after sales and delivery. Customers are the heart of any business, and maintaining relationships with them is an ongoing process.

So, as a brand, you need to connect with your audience to form a strong relationship. You need to interact with them to show you value their opinion. 

This is where social media can help you. According to a study, 80% of consumers expect companies to interact with them on social media. People love when brands interact with real people.

And, using any social media platform, you can connect with your customers and give them an opportunity to engage with your brand. 

Here are few ways you can connect with your audience on a deeper level:

• Social media is a great place to gather information about your customers. Users love to share their interests, preferences, and expectations online. Use this opportunity to ask for your customers’ opinions. 

Post content that encourages them to share their thoughts about your brand and product. This will show your company cares about customer’s opinions and they can trust you in return. 

• A simple Thank You goes a long way on social media. Let your customer know that you appreciate them by showing gratitude on social media. 

For example, if one of your customers on social media shares some feedback about a brand, take time to respond to them or share or retweet their message. 

• Create great content like video, user-generated content to gain the interest of your customer on social media. 

For example, you can post video tutorials or a demo video of your product service to engage more people. 

• Behind-the-scenes content can also help you build a deeper connection with your social media audience. By sharing behind-the-scenes photos and videos of your employees, workforce, and products can help you secure their trust. 

Connecting with your social media audience should be a crucial part of your marketing strategy. 

If you only blast your audience with sales pitches and promotional content, they’ll surely lose interest in the long run. 

So, make sure to be relatable, fun, and original while connecting with the audience on every social media channel. 

You can take Burger King’s Twitter handle as an example here. The brand never fails to interact with its Twitter audience. 

Posting conversational content like this can encourage others to reply, share, like, and retweet more. This way, your brand appears more approachable and human to the audience. 

3. Grows Your Brand Reputation

We’ll give you three reasons to convince; your brand reputation depends on your social media presence because:

• From the quality of your service or product to overall customer experience, chances are people are already talking, tweeting, and sharing about your business online.

• Today’s customers are highly dependent on third-party recommendations and reviews.

• Word of mouth is still a thing even in this digital world. 

The takeaway? 

Your brand’s reputation is in the hands of your social media audience. And, here’s what you can do to manage that reputation online: 

• Determine whether your customers are truly satisfied with your products or business. You can dig into all of your social media posts, mentions, comments, feedback to understand where your online reputation currently stands. 

• Take a good look at all the positive and negative feedback. Be positive while responding to negative feedback. 

• While commenting or answering questions on social media, make sure to personalize each response. Use more empathetic words like please and thank you for showing appreciation. 

• If you get positive feedback, make sure to share or retweet it. These praises will help in brand advocacy. 

• Don’t just respond. Take proper action based on the comments and feedback you receive from social media. 

You can easily create a solid reputation across all social networking platforms based on all these action steps. 

4. Builds a Strong Community

It doesn’t matter whether you have 100 or 1000 followers. If you don’t have a strong community on social media, you won’t get proper engagement. 

No matter what content you post, without an engaged community, you won’t get good results. 

A strong community on social media attracts potential customers and creates a welcoming, engaging environment. 

It also helps you foster brand loyalty as community members will recommend your brand for a positive experience.

Social media communities can also build trust by increasing your brand visibility. 

As a result, your customer will advocate for your brand online at any cost. And, most importantly, your customer retention rates will always stay high. 

So, if you’re wondering how to build a strong community on social media, we’ve got your back. 

Here are a few ways you can build a community on every social networking platform out there. 

• Invite new and old customers you do business with to follow or like your Facebook page, Linkedin, Twitter, or Instagram account.

• Working with influencers can help you build a strong community on social media. You can ask an influencer on your niche to promote your product or service to their community members. 

Also, you can take interviews, tag them on social media, ask them to share or comment on your posts to get more engaged followers.

The best way to build a community on social media is – groups. If you don’t have a group yet, build one! 

On Facebook or Linkedin groups, you can post content, network with people, and ask for feedback efficiently. 

Starbuck has done a great job with its social media strategy.

They’ve managed to build an engaged community of loyal customers who use different platforms to share their positive reviews or just to say thank you.  

5. Helps to Convert More Customers

61% of organizations use social media to increase conversions, and 49% use it to identify and nurture leads, according to Hootsuite. 

Why? 

For starters, social media users have more purchasing power than anything. 

Also, social media provides a lot of features that are great for customers to show interest in your business and products. 

For example, Facebook allows creating lead generation ads that display only to your target audience. Pinterest allows you to use rich pins that show information about your business. Using Instagram, you can promote posts, stories, and reels to convert more customers into leads. 

So, if you’re thinking about using social media to generate customers, here are few things you must include in your strategy:

• Make seamless, easy-to-navigate mobile-friendly social media landing pages. Your landing pages should make a positive impression in visitors’ minds. It should be well optimized and clear enough to express your brand’s voice. 

For example, take a look at Google Pixel’s Instagram page how they’ve kept their landing page attractive yet straightforward. 

• Sometimes all you need to do is ask! If you use proper CTA on your social media bio and post. It can increase your conversion rate. 

• This is an obvious yet worth mentioning tip- be consistent! Everything should be consistent enough to convert followers into customers, from the tone, image to the color scheme and content. 

• Provide social proof as much as you can. Social media is the best place to post customer testimonials, positive reviews, and user-generated content. This way, you can show your brand’s authenticity to users.

6. You Can Provide Faster & Better Customer Support

Another reason why social media is important for businesses is customer support satisfaction.

Let’s take examples of two companies. 

1. Company A: invests a lot of effort into customer retention. After a customer makes a purchase, they follow up with them frequently. And never fails to provide outstanding customer support. 

2. Company B: lead with a “make sale and then leave ’em” approach! Doesn’t put much effort into follow-up and never picks up customer queries after a sale. 

Now, let’s answer this – would you rather buy a product from Company A or Company B? We’re pretty sure you’ve chosen Company A! 

Reason? 

Well, today’s customers are more demanding about their expectations and preferences. 

They want brands to communicate with them almost anytime and anywhere. They expect businesses to help them with new information and provide personalized products based on their needs.

In short, when it comes to customer support, they want exceptional service from companies. 

But, the times of phone calls or long emails are long gone. This is the era of digitization, and social media is the only way to provide that much-needed customer support 24×7. 

According to Salesforce, 89% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases after a positive customer service experience. And, here’s how you can use social media to offer that positive customer service experience:

• Create a specific social media handle for 24×7 customer support. Using a separate account can help you filter important customer questions, feedback, and complaints.

For example, Slack uses a separate Twitter account called @SlackLoveTweets to share customers’ feedback and queries. 

• Respond to audience queries on social media as quickly as possible. Being responsive to all the questions shows that your brand cares about customer needs. 

According to Facebook, if you respond to 90% of messages within 15 minutes or less, you’ll get a very responsive badge on your Facebook business page. However, it’s not always possible to be available 24×7. That’s why make sure to mention your availability hours correctly on social media. 

• When it comes to customer service on social media, always think out of the box. Customer support doesn’t have to be all about responding to questions or feedback. 

Customer support can be anything that makes your social media audience feel cared for and valued by your brand. And, it should make their purchasing, using, and recommending journey easier. 

Lush’s Instagram handle is one of the best examples of brands using social media for customer support. 

Lush created Instagram story highlights to answer shopping FAQ related to packaging, product purchasing, product information, and much more. 

7. Stay Ahead of Your Competitors

It’s always good for businesses to keep a sharp eye on the competitor. And, social media is a great tool to help you with that. 

Using social media, you’ll be able to:

• Track what audiences are talking about your competitors. By tracking their comments, regular posts, and updates, you can learn what’s working for them and how you’re performing compared to them. 

• You can look at various metrics like follower counts, likes, interactions, or engagement to compare with your competitor’s results.  

• Also, using social media, you’ll be able to avoid mistakes other businesses are making on different platforms. 

• Based on your competitor’s social media posts, you can get updates about industry trends, trending events.

• Staying ahead of your competitors using social media means you’ll know when your rival brand is launching a new product or a specific feature. 

Now that you’ve got an idea of how social media can help you research your competitors, let’s talk about some competitor analysis tools:

Hootsuite: A great tool that lets you measure competitors, keywords, hashtags on every social media channel. The best part about this tool is you can analyze everything from a single easy-to-use dashboard.

Buzzsumo: Want to know what your competitors shared the most? Buzzsumo is the tool for you. It allows you to analyze competitors’ strengths and weaknesses using great graphics and an all-in-one dashboard.

8. Increase Website Traffic

More than 4 billion people all over the world use social media, and the numbers are only going to increase in the upcoming years. 

Now, if you use social media in the right way, you can use this popularity to drive traffic to your website. 

But, how? Well, here are some ways you can try-

Fill Your Profile

The first thing visitors see after clicking your social media page is your profile. Whether it’s your profile picture or bio, make sure to use it properly. For instance, you can write a clear and crisp bio and add a link to your website’s landing page to gain more traffic. 

Promote Your Blogs

What’s the point of creating blogs if no one can’t read them, right? 

This is where social media comes into play. You can run ads on different platforms to promote your blog posts and attract more traffic to your website. 

For promoting every blog, you can use a scheduler tool like Buffer or Hootsuite to drive traffic consistently. 

Post When Your Audience is Online

If you want to drive traffic into your website, post when your audience is online. Use a social media analytic tool to understand when audiences are active the most. Then promote your website or blog content according to the timeline. 

9. Establish as a Thought Leader 

In today’s digital world, consumers are looking for brands, influencers, and online coaches for gathering information. 

According to the 2021 Edelman trust Barometer, after the Covid-19 pandemic, people are slowly losing their trust from other reputable sources like NGOs, media, and government. 

On the other hand, the good news is 61% of people trust businesses for gathering information. 

And that’s why social media is crutial for businesses to establish themselves as thought leaders. 

It doesn’t matter which industry you belong to; you can use social media to share information or insights about your brand’s niche. 

For example, one of the famous entrepreneurs, Neil Patel, has established himself as a thought leader on social media. From Instagram to youtube, he is known for sharing helpful, updated information on digital marketing. 

Another great example of thought leadership is the GE brand. The company has done a great job with its social media strategy. Whether it’s Facebook or Instagram, you’ll always get relevant, informative content on development in technology.  

The Bottom Line

Why do we always remember brands like Nike or Google? Well, because they never fail to keep a positive reputation. And the good news is, you can manage your online reputation too. 

From gathering customers’ insights to driving traffic, social media can reward you in many ways. All you have to do is understand the power of social media and focus on your social media presence. 

We hope we’ve successfully convinced you why social media is important for your business. And how you can use it the right way.