5 Reasons Why Your Business Needs a Social Media Strategy
Let’s face it: social media has taken over our lives.
Gone are the days of radio and TV being the main sources of media consumption. With the rise of social media platforms, streaming and the ever-improving smartphones, content is consumed faster than ever before.
How should your business adapt to this digital innovation? If your business has been running since the Gen X days, do you keep things traditional? If your business was born out of the millennial or Gen Z age, do you just use social media to promote yourselves and just see where it goes? Whatever the age of your business may be, you cannot discount the rise of social media and you need to take advantage of it.
Here are 5 reasons why your business needs a social media strategy:
The world is living in social media already, and we’re not stopping.
The world is really going digital and your business has to acknowledge that there is a need to adapt and really focus more on having a social media strategy. In 2018, We Are Social and Hootsuite have reported these statistics:
The number of internet users in 2018 is 4.021 billion, up 7 percent year-on-year
The number of social media users in 2018 is 3.196 billion, up 13 percent year-on-year
The number of mobile phone users in 2018 is 5.135 billion, up 4 percent year-on-year
*Full article found here.
Because of this rising trend, people are now spending more time on social media, consuming a lot of content and ads. The world’s digital progression is rapidly increasing so don’t get lost in the race and competition. Jump in and make your mark on social media. There’s nowhere to go but up from here.
2. Your customers are on social media.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram – these are powerful platforms that have changed the landscape of businesses today. Your company has to penetrate social media platforms and realize that your customers are now found online. The competition now is this: how do you stand out and get the attention of your customers? The moment you create the right strategy, these people will follow you on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Engagement will go higher as you add more followers to your social media accounts, leading to a greater increase in customers purchasing your products and paying for your services.
3. Influencers need you, and you need them.
Think about the biggest celebrities and social media influencers today. If you look at their social media following, you will see them in the hundreds of thousands, even millions. Anything they post gets thousands of likes in a matter of minutes. That’s how powerful the social media platform is. You don’t need to do a TV commercial ad anymore really, for example. A shout-out from a top celebrity/influencer/vlogger of your brand or product can get you, customers, instantly. Seeing that this marketing strategy is key to the success of your business in the digital space, creating the right one will increase your company’s credibility. Why? People follow these influencers religiously. Anything they endorse and support, their followers will endorse and support. That’s how everything works now, and you need to take advantage of it.
4. Social Media can drive the success or failure of your business.
While social media can really help enhance the credibility and profitability of your business, it also has a downside to it: if you do not know how to engage correctly on social media and if you do not take care of your customer service really well, you are doomed for a social media backlash that can ruin your company’s reputation. When customers are dissatisfied, a lot of them really call out companies online, creating viral posts that will be hard to unsee. A social media strategy will allow you to come up with strategies and campaigns that can help avoid such a disaster, aiming to create a community of customers online that will provide positive feedback and recommendations to help your company reach maximum success on social media platforms.
5. It is an opportunity to use authenticity to build a community.
If your company embraces social media the right way, a lot of benefits and success will be celebrated. What social media does is provides an avenue for organizations, companies and movements to build a community to enlarge their reach. When you establish a personal touch to your company’s social media presence, it gives customers an opportunity to engage in a much better way.
Some companies would establish a tone of voice or a face that represents the company and use that as the means to build relationships with current and potential customers online. To build a strong community of customer engagement online, a social media strategy must cover key elements for this to happen – identify the target audience, identify what will grab their attention, and identify strategies that will make you relevant to them.
In summary, if your business really focuses on creating social media strategies done with proper research, it will have a significant impact on the success of your brand, products and services.
Lori Ruff, Chief Brand Officer and Social Media Strategist of ETM Media, said this:
“Social media is here. It’s not going away; not a passing fad. Be where your customers are: in social media.”
If you haven’t tapped into any social media strategies yet for your business, drop everything and meet your core team right now. Start brainstorming and don’t get left behind. Make your business known to the world out there. And if your company has tried already but have not seen any significant effects on your online presence, customer increase and customer retention, regroup and create a more effective strategy. Think outside the box and start over. There are endless possibilities in the world of social media, and I believe we have only scratched the surface.
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