Post by Trade facilitator on Jan 31, 2018 15:56:27 GMT 1
Successful business leaders across the globe are discovering more ways social media can add value to the growth of their business or organizations. Interestingly, some are still skeptical about the value social media can contribute to their businesses.
Social media have become an essential tool for personal and organizational branding, communication, engagements and sales. While such skepticism may be understandable, it is not justifiable when it is responsible for corporate communication breakdown and business loss.
As posited by Eric Qualman, author of Socialnomics, ‘’we don’t have choice on whether we do social media; the question is how well we do it.’’
The digital age provides a level-playing field for all brands. But whether or not brands are interested in playing on the global field is a question.
Here therefore are some benefits of using social media for your business:
Brand Awareness
Social media is a powerful tool for creating, distinguishing and maintaining a strong brand presence both online and offline. It gives access to the world of endless human and resource connectivity. Businesses can build formidable brands through social media without huge budget. This is one comparative advantage of social media over several other means of marketing. Through social media, small businesses have emerged industry challengers; personality brands have also gained prominence just by tapping into the benefits of being social. Social media gives a voice to brands or personality and promote their reach without borders
Audience Insight
Businesses are primarily set up to produce products and render services, hence, the need to constantly get a clear perspective into who your targets are, where they are, what they are doing and how you can reach and convince them to patronize your products and services and to also retain them. Social media offer such analyses, helping your business to make smarter choices through business chains.
For instance, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram offer targeted audiences for organizational pages, giving you demographic details of your audience. This in turn creates a better insight into designing more customer-focused products and services.
Engagement And Feedback
Customers go online to share their views and sentiments. Social media are where businesses could listen to them. As a business, social media give you instant access to customer perspectives, reviews and thoughts – positive or negative. This informs your immediate line of action as a business. This is often referred to as ‘social listening’. Prior to the rise and dominance of social media, listening was only possible through traditional research methods. Now, brands are able to save a lot of money hitherto spent conducting research into the information already on social media platforms.
A local market research outfit claimed that, ‘’71% of consumers who experience a quick and effective brand response on social media are likely to recommend that brand to others’’. The importance of this on brand and product performance is that brands that are not on social media cannot receive feedback from their customers, while brands that are active on the social media increase their chances of transacting through recommendations. This has become one of the most effective means of brand promotion.
Market Intelligence
Understanding market landscape is decisive for business growth. Through social media monitoring, you can gain key information on your competitors and market intelligence. The outcome of such social intelligence gathering process is to help make more strategic business decisions and stay ahead of others in that business.
Setting up streams to monitor competition can significantly help improve market strategies. The caution, however, is to not to blow off by the activities of your competitions.
Business Leads
Social media are largely defined by the streams and stems of conversation on, around and about content that could turn out to be a potential market lead. Ushers are constantly giving clues on what they want in products and services. Listening to industry-focused conversations helps in determining when to join conversations and ultimately map and reach out to prospective customers. Lead generation is certainly, a sure path to building an active list of prospective customers via social media.
Navigating the social media landscape could be reasonably challenging if approached with little or no expert’s insight. Hence, before signing up on social media for business purposes, you should seek expert opinion. This will give you a deeper insight about risks and benefits of social media engagement.
Social media have become an essential tool for personal and organizational branding, communication, engagements and sales. While such skepticism may be understandable, it is not justifiable when it is responsible for corporate communication breakdown and business loss.
As posited by Eric Qualman, author of Socialnomics, ‘’we don’t have choice on whether we do social media; the question is how well we do it.’’
The digital age provides a level-playing field for all brands. But whether or not brands are interested in playing on the global field is a question.
Here therefore are some benefits of using social media for your business:
Brand Awareness
Social media is a powerful tool for creating, distinguishing and maintaining a strong brand presence both online and offline. It gives access to the world of endless human and resource connectivity. Businesses can build formidable brands through social media without huge budget. This is one comparative advantage of social media over several other means of marketing. Through social media, small businesses have emerged industry challengers; personality brands have also gained prominence just by tapping into the benefits of being social. Social media gives a voice to brands or personality and promote their reach without borders
Audience Insight
Businesses are primarily set up to produce products and render services, hence, the need to constantly get a clear perspective into who your targets are, where they are, what they are doing and how you can reach and convince them to patronize your products and services and to also retain them. Social media offer such analyses, helping your business to make smarter choices through business chains.
For instance, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram offer targeted audiences for organizational pages, giving you demographic details of your audience. This in turn creates a better insight into designing more customer-focused products and services.
Engagement And Feedback
Customers go online to share their views and sentiments. Social media are where businesses could listen to them. As a business, social media give you instant access to customer perspectives, reviews and thoughts – positive or negative. This informs your immediate line of action as a business. This is often referred to as ‘social listening’. Prior to the rise and dominance of social media, listening was only possible through traditional research methods. Now, brands are able to save a lot of money hitherto spent conducting research into the information already on social media platforms.
A local market research outfit claimed that, ‘’71% of consumers who experience a quick and effective brand response on social media are likely to recommend that brand to others’’. The importance of this on brand and product performance is that brands that are not on social media cannot receive feedback from their customers, while brands that are active on the social media increase their chances of transacting through recommendations. This has become one of the most effective means of brand promotion.
Market Intelligence
Understanding market landscape is decisive for business growth. Through social media monitoring, you can gain key information on your competitors and market intelligence. The outcome of such social intelligence gathering process is to help make more strategic business decisions and stay ahead of others in that business.
Setting up streams to monitor competition can significantly help improve market strategies. The caution, however, is to not to blow off by the activities of your competitions.
Business Leads
Social media are largely defined by the streams and stems of conversation on, around and about content that could turn out to be a potential market lead. Ushers are constantly giving clues on what they want in products and services. Listening to industry-focused conversations helps in determining when to join conversations and ultimately map and reach out to prospective customers. Lead generation is certainly, a sure path to building an active list of prospective customers via social media.
Navigating the social media landscape could be reasonably challenging if approached with little or no expert’s insight. Hence, before signing up on social media for business purposes, you should seek expert opinion. This will give you a deeper insight about risks and benefits of social media engagement.
