Benefits Of Social Media For Business Growth

Benefits of social media for brand building

1. Increase brand awareness

With over half of the world’s population using social media, platforms like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter a natural place to reach new and highly targeted potential customers.

2. Humanize your brand

The ability to create real human connections is one of the key benefits of social media for business. Introduce your followers to the people who make up your company and showcase how existing customers are using and benefiting from your products.

Authenticity builds trust. Trust, in turn, builds marketing receptiveness and drives new business. And social is the best place to get real!

Show how you’re embracing your brand values, how your product works in real life, and how you’re putting the interests of your employees and customers first.

3. Generate leads

Social media offers an easy and low-commitment way for potential customers to express interest in your business and your products. Lead generation is such an important benefit of social media for business that many social networks offer advertising formats specifically designed to collect leads.

For example, McCarthy and Stone used Facebook lead ads that allowed people interested in learning more about their real estate projects to learn more about the properties, with just a couple of taps.

The ads wound up producing 4.3 times more sales leads than the year before, at a cost 2 times lower than more traditional digital prospecting campaigns with real estate ads.

4. Boost sales

Your social accounts are a critical part of your sales funnel—the process through which a new contact becomes a customer. (Lingo alert: this is called social selling!)

As the number of people using social media continues to grow and social sales tools evolve, social networks will become increasingly important for product search and ecommerce. The time is right to align your social marketing efforts with sales goals.

Take Hootsuite academy’s social selling courses and learn how to find leads and drive sales with social media.

5. Partner with influencers

Recommendations from family and friends play a huge role in consumer decisions, as do reviews. When you get people talking about your product or company on social media, you build brand awareness and credibility, and set yourself up for more sales.

One key way to drive social word of mouth is to partner with influencers—people who have a large following on social media and can draw the attention of that following to your brand.

Lingerie brand Adore Me partnered with influencers for a series of unboxing videos on Instagram, and saw a huge bump from content that was showcased directly in the influencers’ accounts. This included a doubled click-through rate and a seven percent higher sales conversion rate. 

6. Go viral

As people start liking, commenting on, and sharing your social posts, your content is exposed to new audiences—their friends and followers. Going viral takes this concept one step further.

As people share your content with their networks, and their networks follow suit, your content spreads across the internet, potentially getting thousands or even millions of shares.

This exposure is especially beneficial because, in a world where there is far more content than any one person could ever consume, a friend’s social share acts as a kind of pre-screening.

Going viral is no easy task, of course, but without social media, it would be next to impossible.

Being on social media also means that your fans can help you with this goal… like when one TikTok user created choreography for Grammarly’s Youtube ad audio and sparked a trend of 100,000-plus users doing the same.

7. Customer and audience engagement

Social networks allow you to interact directly with customers and fans, and likewise give them the chance to interact directly with your brand. Unlike traditional media, which offers only one-way communication, social media is a two-way street.

If you want customers and followers to be engaged, you have to be engaged yourself. Stay active and respond to comments and questions on your own social media posts in a way that’s appropriate to your brand.

You can also use social media monitoring to keep an eye on what people are saying across the social web.

8. Learn more about your customers

Social media generates a huge amount of data about your customers in real-time. You can use that information to make smarter business decisions.

All of the major social networks offer analytics that provide demographic information about the people interacting with your account. This can help you tailor your social media marketing strategy to better speak to your real audience.

9. Keep an eye on the competition

It’s also important to know what people are saying about your competitors.

For example, tracking mentions of your competitors might reveal pain points with their products or services that you could reach out to address, winning new customers in the process.

Monitoring the competition on social media also means you’ll be aware when your competitors launch new products, run promotions and release new reports or data.