How social media for business can be a powerful tool
Businesses that harness the power of social media have suddenly leapfrogged their brand in ways not possible before the age of social media.
Social media has been the default go-to platform for the average online user since its inception. As social beings, we tend to socialize on social networking platforms available to us.
Lately, the Covid-19 pandemic has increased socializing online and where the masses are, commercial activity will follow. This is a huge opportunity for businesses to make use of.
Famous brands and companies utilize social media quite a lot. It has suddenly become a tool that boosts profitability. Likewise, small brands and businesses can jump the bandwagon as well.
Therefore, social media for business can be a very powerful potential to reach markets, engage with them and funnel sales activities. With the right strategy, social media platforms are a game-changer for your business.
Social media has a good ‘reach’ to potential customers.
It has the potential to reach tens of thousands of social media users. This reach is further broadened with ‘sharing’ features that social media platforms have.
According to an article by Sprout Social, Facebook’s ‘reach’ are in three categories. Organic, Paid and Viral.
Firstly, organic reach is an estimate based on the number of ‘likes’ a business has on its Facebook page.
Secondly, paid reach is an estimate based on the target number of people Facebook will broadcast a post to. Facebook usually targets its reach to categories such as age groups, gender, geographical location, etc.
And thirdly, viral reach is based on the number of times social media audiences shared posts that have interesting, inspiring or humorous content.
The higher the number of reaches, the higher the potential to drive marketing content. That in turn can attract potential customers to your business.
Social media encourages ‘engagements’ with customers.
It allows you to have meaningful engagements with your clients and markets. Essentially, it has the potential to boost business profitability.
With social media, businesses can socialize with their clients with ease. There are social media features that turn business workflows into sociable communications.
As an example, a Facebook page measures user engagement the ways users interact with it. Another article on Sprout Social lists these interactions in four types.
- Interaction with Page by call-to-action button clicks,
- Interacting with posts through like and share clicks
- Interaction in direct messaging via chat functions
- Interacting with other pages through page mentions to your page
These virtual engagement features makes social media a powerful tool connect with your customers at all times.
Social media can ‘funnel’ in customers
Social media can be powerful to funnel in your potential customers. It starts by attracting customers from target markets and guide them towards converting to sales and retaining them as repeat clients.
This next article from Sprout Social explains it even further. Excerpts from the article speak of the five phases that are involved.
- Awareness – Attracting new people who are currently unaware of your brand.
- Consideration – Standing out among your competition so that new audience members remember you.
- Action – Compelling your audience to take action and make a purchase.
- Engagement – Using social media to stay top-of-mind and keep your audience engaged after they’ve purchased.
- Advocacy – Building enough trust with your audience that they want to recommend you to others.
As a side note, implementing a successful social media funnel requires careful market analysis and strategy. Regardless, it is one of the powers that social media can offer to small businesses.
Conclusion
To conclude, social media opened avenues not possible to businesses before. The reach that only expensive newspaper ads and billboards can achieve has been possible with social media.
With social media, a business can reach, engage and funnel in potential customers. These are three of the main powers of social media and how it can benefit a small business.
If you have not created a social media account for your business yet, you should create one today.