Despite it being a digital age, it’s also an information age, and that can have you feeling like you’re always behind or trying to shout over an endless sea of social media posts, blogs, podcasts, and content in all forms.
We get it. It’s easy to think it would be simpler to just nix your social media channels all together in favor of a simpler approach. You may even wonder how it’s relevant to your specific business.
While you could say ‘forget it’, we strongly recommend not doing that for a number of reasons. Even if you don’t have 10k+ followers or you don’t see the engagement you’d like to, it’s worth it to stay active on your social media platforms.
Here’s why…
The Importance of Social Media for Your Business
Brand Awareness –
This one might be the most obvious. By having a presence on social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram, your business becomes a go-to resource when your potential customers need it.
It helps enhance people’s familiarity with your brand, educates them on your offerings, and enables your content to serve as a resource. Once your product/services become more timely and relevant to your customer’s lives, they will know who they want to buy from.
Improved SEO –
By having social profiles, you increase the chance of being found via web search. Social profiles often dominate search engine results and take up more real estate on the first page, in conjunction with the company’s official website.
Enhanced Exposure & Referral Traffic –
Having your business on social media will also create a stronger, more accessible online presence with more exposure, and better opportunities to draw people in.
If you don’t believe us, the proof is in the data. By tracking your campaigns through Google Analytics, you’ll be able to see just how much traffic social media is funneling to your website each month. (We call this metric ‘social media referral traffic’.)
Additional Reach via Social Search –
When potential customers are searching for brands from directly within a social platform – whether by name, hashtags, or keywords; they’ll be able to find you from right where they’re already hanging out. This is a part of ‘inbound marketing’ and it’s extremely effective.
Real-Time Updates –
By posting consistently on the platforms that are best suited to your brand, you demonstrate authority, credibility, and show that you’re a living, breathing, active business.
It can be hard to show that from just a static website, which is built to be more ‘evergreen’ and require fewer changes day-to-day. Social media makes you seem available and ready to serve!
Elevates Brand Loyalty & Humanism –
On that note, by providing regular, value-driven content, education, and lifestyle-related posts, you demonstrate a more human side that today’s consumers want and expect.
Whether you’re a product or service-based business, people are looking for a ‘why’ behind what they buy. They want to connect with your brand. They care about the people making the products or providing a service.
Social media can help you reach a wider audience in a more personalized way; turning followers into raving fans and even friends.
Monitoring –
Social media allows you to monitor online conversations, participate in them, and manage them when necessary.
Instead of people talking about you (positive or negative) without you knowing, you can read, respond to, resolve, and address customer comments or complaints. This furthers the connection and creates a customer service opportunity for you to capitalize on.
You can even create brand response templates that allow multiple people on your team (or partner agencies) to reply quickly and consistently.
Paid Advertising
…and that’s all just for free, organic reach! When it comes to paid advertising through social media platforms like Facebook, there are additional benefits such as:
- Lower cost advertising than traditional mediums
- Highly targeted campaigns for more qualified leads
- Pre-determined estimated daily reach and geotargeting options
- Real-time performance analysis (& the ability to tweak ads on the fly)
- Increased brand loyalty due to the frequency & relationship building aspect in conjunction with organic posts
- Increases inbound traffic directly to your website, creating an higher chance of generating leads
- Measurable results & conversions – they do exist through social media!
Measuring the Results
Speaking of the results – well be honest, many can seem qualitative, as depicted by the list above. We’ll consider these the “soft benefits”.
Even some paid advertising, like Facebook ‘likes ads’, are predominantly for the growth of your online community and the ability to increase the organic reach of your content.
Again, this is an opportunity for building relationships and growing brand awareness.
From a quantitative standpoint, Facebook advertising runs on a bidding hierarchy and very complex algorithms. The higher the bid, the more exposure, which also means a higher, pre-calculated cost. You’re also competing with 2 million other businesses who use Facebook advertisements and often compete for the same audiences. It’s not about industry competition, but dependent on specific targeting to a shared audience.
For ads to be seen and prioritized by Facebook, things like quality and relevance also play a huge part. Facebook assigns a relevance score to every ad, which helps them determine how likely a user is to interact with said ad. Low score, less exposure. High score, more exposure.
High-quality, scroll-stopping creative assets as well as compelling copy play a huge part here.
Additionally, we’d argue that social media referral traffic is one of the most important metrics because that’s directly showing you how many people are visiting your website, because of your social media presence & efforts with content and ads.
When using the Facebook pixel on the backend of your website you can even determine conversion rates of actions that take place – such as buying a product or booking an appointment.
When a conversion doesn’t take place, you can leverage retargeting, by showing ads to recent website visitors or lookalike audiences.
Facebook offers various types of ads – likes, clicks, leads, etc; depending on what your marketing objective or desired ‘result’ is.
With single image ads, carousel (multi-image), and video ads, the sky’s the limit when it comes to your creative. Just make sure to only include 20% or less of text on the image!
It’s worth investing in a high-quality library of digital assets and ensuring you have season-specific imagery.
So, what do you think? Does your business fully leverage the power of social media? Why or why not?
If we can be of further assistance, be sure to get in touch!
-The R&A Team
