By Lauren Priddey
With the increasing rise of social media popularity in previous years, many of the most commonly used platforms have appeared to quickly become the main points of contact for both businesses and other users alike. This should come as no surprise when the growing number of benefits on offer to businesses choosing to use social media are taken into consideration.
Within this article, we aim to discuss the benefits of social media for business and the ways that your business should be utilizing social platforms to improve overall business operations.
Keep Your Audience Up to Date
Social media platforms hold the ability to be great for traffic, helping to lead to an increase in overall visits to your company website. However, social media can also be used to express the persona and personality of your business, creating a method of communication between both new and existing customers that was not made available to us previously; this gives your business personality, and can provide a great way to better connect with your target audience in a way that will feel more individual.
Unfortunately for us, there is no way real to guarantee that your customers will be returning to your website on a regular basis, meaning important changes, such as the introduction of new products or services that could increase the chances of customers converting on your site could be missed out on. Social media offers a solution to this potential issue, allowing for you to share updates straight to the newsfeeds of your followers, keeping them engaged in your business and increasing their chances of returning to your site in the future. Through connecting with your followers, your website traffic should see an increase; as well as a steady increase in new and returning customers.
Keeping your business, and the great services that you can provide to your customers, fresh in the minds of those who are most likely to be interested can help both you and your company to flourish.
To use social media to your advantage, you should be aiming to upload frequently across all of the social platforms your business is present upon, however, your aim should not be to advertise and promote your services at any possible opportunity. Instead, take the time to interact with your audience and portray to them the personality of your company. Make sure that you regularly respond to comments to be as engaging as possible and provide your target audience with a positive experience of your brand.
Providing your followers with regular updates on your business and any new services or products being introduced that may be of interest can also provide a great way to increase your engagement rates and keep your potential customers interested. Keeping your audience up to date is vital to ensuring your company stays relevant and users do not lost interest in your operations; provide your followers with offers and deals as to provide incentive to revisit your company website.
Efficient Customer Service
Social media has led to huge improvements within the world of customer service, opening your business up to a more streamlined and efficient method of dealing with complaints and customer enquiries. However, customer service over social media is only successful if your business accounts are active and monitored regularly, so ensuring that features such as notifications are working and a good social media management strategy is in place can be crucial to the effect social platforms will have on the quality of your customer service.
To those looking to optimize and dramatically improve their overall business operations and the quality of service being provided to users, it may be worth considering the setup of a strategy to ensure all of your social platforms are closely monitored to improve engagement and customer interaction.
Should a user make a complaint or inquire about your services on any given social platform, a procedure should be in place within your company’s social media strategy to publish a suitable and relevant response as soon as possible; a long response time or simply ignoring your followers could put across a bad impression that, if escalated, could reflect badly on your business as a whole.
The way in which you respond can also have a huge impact upon the quality of your customer service. Making sure that you get back to potential customers in a polite and, if dealing with a complaint, apologetic manner is important for the maintenance of a professional standing; proving that you are quick to resolve any issues and do so efficiently will also provide your customers with a great perception of your company on a whole.
Organic Benefits
While it was previously confirmed by Google that elements of social media such as likes, shares, favorites, and retweets will not directly have an impact upon rankings within the search engine’s organic search results, there is a relationship that can be seen between popularity of your accounts upon these social media platforms and an overall improvement in your ranking status.
While you are not very likely to gain any benefits in terms of search engine optimization (SEO) improvements, like factors such as backlinks and domain authority, social media can provide a range of businesses with a platform to showcase the content and services that they have on offer; this provides companies with exposure to an increased percentage of their target audience, increasing the number of potential customers aware of both you and your business as a direct result.
To conclude, social media provides a range of great benefits to the businesses taking advantage of such platforms, providing exposure at little to no cost that could help to transform the success of your company. By making just a few small changes to the way that your business uses social media to interact with and keep your target audience updated on your products services, you can work to greatly improve the overall operations of your business, and the quality of customer service that is being provided to your followers on a whole.
For many, social media provides a way to get your business out in front of a much larger audience of potential customers interested in what you can provide to them, knowing how to harness this tool and use it to your absolute advantage can be the key to improving business success.
