7 Benefits Of Social Media For Small Businesses

Social Media is a large part of many people’s lives. We use it to stay in touch with loved ones, keep up with our favorite meme groups, and express ourselves. So why is it so important for small businesses to have a social media presence? According to the Pew Research Center, as of 2019, 72 percent of the United States used some form of social media. That’s a lot of people. It’s also not just young people who are interacting on social media. Roughly 40 percent of adults 65 and up, 69 percent of adults 50-64 and 82 percent of adults 30-49 also use social media. So regardless of who your target customers are, a large portion of them are interacting with social media. This makes it an essential place for businesses to interact with customers and promote their products. 

Easily Communicate With Customers

Another important thing to note is that your customers are not just hopping on to Facebook or Instagram every now and then. The Pew Research Center also notes that 74 percent of people who use Facebook are using it daily. So that means as a small business you have the full seven days a week you can potentially interact with customers (and you should use them all). Social Media sites also make it really easy to do that. Create a post, add an image or link to a service you want to promote and then post it to your customers. You can even schedule posts ahead of time within Facebook or Instagram or using third party services like Canva. 

Cheaper Advertising

Using social media by itself is completely free, which can be a big boon to small businesses with very little advertising budget. However sites like Facebook also give you the option to boost posts you make or create ads for as little as one dollar per ad. Your reach will vary depending on your budget, amount of days you want it to run and the amount of people you are targeting. Facebook will give you a ballpark figure to help you determine what the reach will be. You can also customize your goals between getting more engagement, messages or calls. On top of that you can also customize your audience by location, age, or page likes. Facebook also offers the ability to turn off ads that you feel have run their course and will only charge you for the number of clicks or impressions the ad has already received. This flexibility plus the lower price point can make Facebook ads a much more profitable way to market your company than other advertising channels such as Google Adwords, especially if you are just starting out.

Boosts Your Website Engagement And SEO Ranking

Website engagement and SEO ranking are closely related. While getting a lot of likes on a post won’t boost either, creating good advertising that causes customers to click a link from the ad to your site will.  As we’ve mentioned previously, this because the more engagement your site receives the better able Google is to judge the relevancy of your site and it’s contents. This in turn will help boost your overall off and on-page SEO ranking over time. It’s important that your on-page SEO and content are as polished as possible. Otherwise, the traffic that your social media pages bring in will be wasted by people immediately leaving your website without making a purchase.

Builds Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is the ability for a person to remember or recognize a brand. Brand awareness is created in large part through conversation. A person is far more likely to purchase from a particular brand if their friend or family member suggested it. One of the easiest ways to influence this is through social media. This is in large part because of how easy social media makes it to share content with just the click or tap of a button. However, you can’t expect everything that you post to be widely shared. Content is important.

It’s important to keep in mind what your customer might find interesting or useful. By creating eye-catching, funny or informative posts, you are very likely to get your current customers to share your posts. From there, some of their friends will also like and share it, creating an exponentially growing chain of awareness. For example, say you’re an electrician. A post that is likely to get a lot of shares and reactions is one that helps inform the public about an electrical safety concern. Such a post appeals to emotion and logic. 

Learn more about your customers

Social media also allows you to learn a lot about your potential customers through how they interact with your content. You will be able to gauge their likes and dislikes by how they react, share and comment on posts. Not only that, but you will be able to get an idea of which specific audiences you should be targeting so that your ads cater to them better. Facebook for instance has a tool called “Insights” that gives you data on relative age, gender and general location of your potential customers. With that knowledge you can then create ads that target a specific location you would like to focus on, or to promote products to an age group that would find them useful. If you are using Facebook Business Suite you can actually delve even deeper into this by create lookalike audiences and name them to easily pull from them when creating an ad. 

You can retarget your audience

Retargeting, also known as remarketing, is a way of helping to keep your brand in front of people after they leave your website. There are many retargeting providers out there such as Mailchimp, ReTargeter or AdRoll that will give you the tools you need to retarget customers. Retargeting works through cookies–a small bit of code that is stored by a browser on your device that is used to identify individual users. You place code that drops cookies to users when they navigate to your site which then lets your retargeting provider know who to send ads to. It’s why you see ads on facebook for items you may have just been googling. The reason why this can be important is because only around 2% of potential customers make a purchase the first time they visit a site. So, by keeping your advertising in front of them you are reinforcing your brand, making it much more likely that they will purchase from you.

Keep an eye on your competition

You most likely already have an idea of who your competition is in your local area. However it is always a good idea to use target keywords on social media sites to see who ranks well within the networks themselves. If you are not sure what keywords to use, the Google Adwords Keyword Planner is a great place to start.  Once you’ve figured this out plug the keywords into the social media site to see what comes up. From there you can go through their pages. The best place to look for information is visitor posts. Go to the posts tab, then “see visitor posts”. From there you’ll be able to see what your competitors are doing right, or wrong, that customers feel strongly enough about to comment on. 

Another handy feature is Facebook’s Pages to Watch. So long as your facebook page has 100 likes, you have access to this feature. This feature allows you to add your top competitors in one place so that you can easily keep track of information such as their likes, posts and engagement week to week. If you click on a page’s name from there, you can see their top posts for the week, making it easier to figure out what type of content is getting the best results.

In short, social media offers up a wealth of opportunities for small businesses. By taking advantage of them properly, you will be able to raise your bottom line by bringing in more customers while potentially saving money on your advertising. 

If you have social media questions or are looking for social media marketing services, give our friendly marketing team a call at 618.681.4030, or book online using the handy button above.

Remember, do what you do best, let us do the rest.