Social media has now reached approximately 4.5 billion people worldwide. It’s become part of everybody’s day to day life, with people spending an average 2 hours a day on social media. Business is a massively benefitting from this huge adoption of social media. In this article, we’re going to discuss the five benefits businesses get from using social media.
When we think of social media, we think about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and most recently, TikTok. However, some of the platforms that are forgotten about when talking about social media are things like WhatsApp and YouTube. YouTube, in fact, is the second most used search engine on the Internet, and WhatsApp is mainly used in group settings and for sharing videos and sharing interesting things online, making them both social media platforms.
Brand Awareness
The first advantage businesses are gaining from using such platforms is brand awareness. Brand awareness is basically getting people to know that your business exists. Like we discussed earlier, with 4.5 billion people on social media, what better place to get people to understand about your business and what you do?
This awareness is obviously massively beneficial for the business as it potentially means more customers and more sales. Imagine before social media, you have a local shop, you hand out flyers, you potentially have a billboard, and if you’re a bigger business, you could afford to pay to be on TV.
However, now with the utilization of social media, you could start a YouTube channel, create a TikTok account, and open a Facebook page. All these are free ways to get your message out there and get people to see your brand increase in your awareness. DollarShaveClub did this extremely well by going viral with one of their first YouTube videos, resulting in their website crashing and them getting 12,000 orders in their first 48 hours. That just could not happen before social media.
Engage Customers
The second benefit of social media to a business is that you can engage your customers. This is because you can tell your story on social media platforms. You can use TikTok to get people to know your CEO. You can use Facebook to get people to see behind the scenes footage of your products being made or your products being marketed can basically humanize your brand through social media.
You can even use social media to get people involved and engage that way. So, for example, Budweiser decided to run a poll on which ad they should run at the Super Bowl. This made customers feel involved with the brand they felt like they chose which advert was run at the Super Bowl. All this engagement through videos and social media makes people loyal to the brand. There might be liking the brand and sharing it with their friends. They feel part of something. This is a massive benefit again; you couldn’t get necessarily before the use of social media.
Increased Sales
The third benefit, and probably one that a lot of businesses want from social media, is increased sales. Anything that increases sales is good for businesses. Now that your business has a loyal following, you can then sell products to these customers. BooHoo has 11 million followers on Instagram and they can use this following to increase their sales. They can post new collections on the grid. They can do sales through their stories because of this huge engagement with their brand. They can now sell to you through social media.
This is not just Instagram. You can sell through Facebook shops; you can sell on TikTok, all these things on social media to help increase a business’s sales. A lot of the time businesses just use social media to generate leads that then create sales. Social media may get a customer engaged, but then there’s a link to the website to then a sale or there’s a link to an offer code that then creates a sale to get you engaged. They then target you with promotions and then make a sale.
What you as a customer, follow these brands because you’re engaged in them and you like what they’re telling you. Another way of creating sales is through affiliates. Basically, what businesses are doing are finding a celebrity that matches their target audience and getting them to sell the products to you rather than directly through themselves. What the business does is incentivizes influencers and celebrities to sell on their behalf. So every time that influencer makes a sale, they get a percentage of the sale.
So the links in the bios, the links on YouTube and the descriptions often make that influencer money. So, for example, a runner on YouTube may put a link to some shoes that they’ve used in the description of the YouTube channel, when the customer clicks that link and purchases through that link, the runner gets a percentage of that sale.
This is beneficial for the business because they made a sale and beneficial to the influencer because they’ve made some money out of promoting that product. Businesses using influencers has become massive because of the trusted nature that influencers have from their audience.
Communication
The fourth benefit is communication, 33% of customers, now say they use social media to communicate with brands rather than the telephone. There’s a trend of people using social media in this way. This is massively beneficial for the business, also for customers as they can get in touch quite quickly.
Social media is great for businesses to communicate because they can highlight anything positive that’s happening within the business. It’s also useful to address the negative. If a customer tweets a negative thing about your business, this can be responded to pretty instantly and a positive action put in place to make it seem like a positive outcome.
Insights and Analytics
The fifth and final benefit of social media is the fact that you can see the insights and analytics of any campaigns or post that you’ve done. You can find out everything about your target market. You can find out their age, the gender, and their interests. All these are massively important to a business as it helps target ads to these people very specifically.
So for example, Nike, if they know that they have a million customers that are interested in running, then they can target running ads at those people. If Nike has a million people interested in tennis, they can target them with the tennis ads helping convert more people because they see in very specific adverts that they’re interested in. If I hate tennis but love running and all I see is tennis adverts, they’re not going to convert me, or if I like running and I see lots of running adverts, eventually they might convert me to a sale.
These analytics are also very important for marketing because you can see what content is trending, what content does well, what content gets comments, what content gets likes, what content gets shared. It’s really useful to see what your customers enjoy seeing on your platforms, and then you can create more of that to get more engagement and in-turn more sales.
Analytics can also be used to see what content drives sales on your website, how many links are going through from that type of content to your website to a sale. So for example, I could post new collection on Boom, click the link to purchase and we can see if that kind of advert converts people to click the link to purchase.
You could run a very similar advert with different colors, different people in the ad but for the same product and see if that converts better and gets more clicks. The more you analyze your data, the better your ads are going to get converted because you can compare them, you can learn what content works and repeat that process. And again, it’s all going back to creating more sales and this is a massive benefit for businesses.
