February 2, 2023
It’s a digital age, and we’re living in it. More than half the world is on social media now – that’s about 59% or 4.76 billion people – meaning that the users on those platforms have an extremely high likelihood of being your customer and/or your audience.
Due to this, social media has become a valuable and essential tool for many brands and businesses over the past few years, but what’s so good about it?
What’s all the fuss about?
- Increased brand awareness: as mentioned earlier, half the world is on social, which can give your brand the opportunity to tap into an enormously sized pool of diverse audiences. Audiences equal reach, and big audiences equal the chance of bigger reach. The more people that are made aware of your brand, the more opportunity your brand has to grow.
- Better customer engagement: a big benefit of social media, is that you can engage directly with your customers on the platforms through comments, likes, link clicks and even direct messages. Being able to interact with your audiences allows them to see your brand as more than just that. It’s something for them to relate to and feel part of, and it can help them feel valued as a customer of your brand.
- Great for smaller budgets: traditional marketing can be notoriously expensive e.g. television, OOH and print, whereas social media allows for a more cost-effective approach to reach target audiences. In some cases, social media can be almost free! But generally, it is most effective when a little bit of spend is put behind it to run paid campaigns (still a lot kinder to finances than traditional marketing channels).
- Valuable audience insight: many platforms have built-in analytics capabilities so that you can gain valuable information about who your audiences are, and what they love or dislike about the content and products you’re posting. In addition to insights that exist within platforms, there are also a number of social listening tools that crawl social media for you and provide you with rich data that can help influence your brand’s strategy.
- Improved customer service: many brands now have a dedicated social media platform to deal with customer queries, and some have it built into all of them. Instead of the old days (probably about 3 years ago) when you would have to email, call a number, or submit a contact form to speak to customer service, consumers are now able to get almost instant responses from your brand. And we all know that excellent customer service is a proven way of building brand trust and retaining customers.
- Increased brand loyalty: building relationships with your consumers on social media can create brand loyalists, communities and brand advocates. Simply by interacting authentically with your consumers and being attentive. Without brand loyalty, a brand may struggle to grow.
It all makes sense now
What’s so good about social media? Well after reading that, hopefully, you answered “everything”.
There are so many benefits to be had for brands on social, and it can be an amazing tool to help yours succeed. With a little help from some time, effort, creativity and a little budget, of course ;).
And if you need help getting started, or fancy a new direction for your brand’s social media strategy… get in touch!