What Are Social Media And How Are They Good For Your Business?
Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks.
Quick Takeaways:
- Social media is an effective way to reach new audiences with engaging content
- Social engagement helps you build trust, authority and also to show your brand personality
- You need a solid plan for engaging content to distribute via social media
With more than three billion people around the world using social media every month, the users and engagement on major platforms just keep increasing.
What you might not know is that you’re ready to get your company’s social media off the ground right now. You don’t need to know every intimidating buzzword or have the magic number of followers. You can get started immediately—and even enjoy yourself in the process.
Social media provides immense potential for businesses because consumers habitually log on to it daily and are exposed to companies. It also presents huge challenges for businesses, however, because it’s an ever-changing space that is extremely noisy and crowded.
It can be difficult to keep up with evolving trends on social media, so B2B reviews and ratings firm Clutch partnered with marketing agency Smart Insights to learn the current state of social media marketing; they surveyed 344 social media marketers from around the world to determine the value of social media, the most engaging content to share, common challenges, and what social media resources businesses are investing in.
Get to know the social medias
What does it mean for your business?
Social media can help your business to: attract customers, get customer feedback and build customer loyalty. increase your market reach, including international markets. do market research and reduce marketing costs.
In business, social media is used to market products, promote brands, connect to customers and foster new business. As a communication platform, social media promotes customer feedback and makes it easy for customers to share their experiences with a company. Businesses can respond quickly to positive and negative feedback, address customer problems and maintain or rebuild customer confidence.
Social media analytics.
This is the practice of gathering and analyzing data from blogs and social media websites to assist in making business decisions. The most common use of social media analytics is to do customer sentiment analysis.
Social media marketing (SMM).
This application increases a company’s brand exposure and customer reach. The goal is to create compelling content that social media users will share with their social networks. A key components of SMM is social media optimization (SMO). Like search engine optimization, SMO is a strategy for drawing new visitors to a website. Social media links and share buttons are added to content and activities are promoted via status updates, tweets and blogs.
Social customer relationship marketing.
Social CRM is a powerful business tool. For example, a Facebook page lets people who like a company’s brand to like the business’s page. This, in turn, creates ways to communicate, market and network. Social media sites give users the option to follow conversations about a product or brand to get real-time market data and feedback.
Recruiting.
Social recruiting has become a key part of employee recruitment strategies. It is a fast way to reach a lot of potential candidates, both active job seekers and people who were not thinking about a job change until they say the recruitment post.
Enterprise social networking.
Businesses also use enterprise social networking to connect people who share similar interests or activities. These applications include internal intranets and collaboration tools, such as Yammer, Slack and Microsoft Teams, that give employees access to information and communication capabilities. Externally, public social media platforms let organizations stay close to customers and make it easy to conduct market research.
What are the benefits of social media?
Social media provides several benefits, including the following:
User visibility.
Social platforms let people easily communicate and exchange ideas or content.
Business and product marketing. These platforms enable businesses to quickly publicize their products and services to a broad audience. Businesses can also use social media to maintain a following and test new markets. In some cases, the content created on social media is the product.
Audience building.
Social media helps entrepreneurs and artists build an audience for their work. In some cases, social media has eliminated the need for a distributor, because anyone can upload their content and transact business online. For example, an amateur musician can post a song on Facebook, get instant visibility among their network of friends, who in turn share it on their networks.
What are enterprise social media best practices?
It is important for companies to have a social media strategy and establish social media goals. These help to build trust, educate their target audience and create brand awareness. They also enable real people to find and learn about a business.
Here are some social media social media best practices for companies to follow:
Establish social media policies that set expectations for appropriate employee social behavior.
These policies should also ensure social media posts do not expose the company to legal problems or public embarrassment. Guidelines should include directives for when an employee must identify them self as a company representative and rules for what type of information can be shared.
Focus on platforms geared to B2B marketing, such as Twitter and LinkedIn.
Put in place an engaging, customer-centric strategy in social media campaigns. An example would be to use Twitter to field questions from customers.
Include rich media, such as pictures and video, in content to make it more compelling and appealing to users.
Use social media analytics tools to measure user engagement with content and to keep on top of trends.
Use a conversational voice in posts that comes across as professional but not rigid.
Shorten long form content to make it social friendly.
Lists and audio and video snippets are examples.
Embrace employees and customers talking positively about the organization and repost that content.
Check in on analytics and management tools frequently, if not on a daily basis, as well as the social media accounts.