Is social media as bad as we’re lead to believe? – World Social Media Day 2018
Posted: 30 June 2018 at 11:50 am | Author: Lauren Daws
With 83% of the UK population now regularly using social media, it’s clear that these channels have had a big impact on our lives. Many people are now suggesting that social media can negatively impact our lives. Poisoning our minds with unrealistic body images and gossip about celebrities lives. Is it taking us away from communicating with each other face-to-face?
Regardless of the negative impacts social media might have on some aspects of our lives, there are certainly a fair few ways it can benefit a business:
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Allow you to reach a wider audience
Since most of the population are now active on at least one social media platform, this gives you another way to reach your potential customers. If your customers are using social media, you should be too.
So, if your business isn’t on social media, you are probably missing out on potential leads and customers!
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Generate leads
Using social media platforms to generate leads can be simple and cost-effective. But how can you generate leads through social media?
- Competitions: This is a tactic used by many businesses on social media. When putting a competition on your social media pages, the prize should be valuable enough to get their attention, but not too valuable that it costs you more money than the leads are worth. You should also make clear that to be entered in the competition, they have to follow/like/share your page, for example. Although, remember to disclose terms and conditions for your competition.
- Share links to gated content: If you post a lot of relevant, up-to-date content on your blog, sharing links to gated content could work well for you. So, next time you share one of your blog posts on social media, hide the content so that it can only be viewed after filling out a data form.
- Targeted social media listening: Monitoring keywords on social media platforms will allow you to see what other people are saying about products/services that are relevant to your business. Monitoring keywords also allows you to check out how your competition are doing. If there’s an area where they’re failing, or not replying to queries, you can swoop in and direct their leads to your website.
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Increase brand awareness
Social media is the perfect tool for putting your brand out there and making yourself known. The more people that enjoy and share your content, the more people are aware of your brand and what you can provide them with.
Posting regular, relevant content on your social media platforms also reminds people of your brand. If they’re logging into Facebook or Twitter every day and are seeing posts from your brand, they are more likely to remember what you’re selling/offering and go to you if they’re in need of something you can help them with.
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Advertise your products/services
Using social media for your business just gives you another platform to promote your products or services on. Rather than waiting for customers to find you, why not find them? Social media gives you the perfect opportunity to do this because you can showcase your products right in front of them.
Advertising your products/services on social media can also increase the audience that you reach. Having more than one social media platform can also help to do this because the audience for each social media platform differs.
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Analytics
Using social tracking tools such as Google Analytics allows you to see how effective (or not effective) your social media efforts have been.
Google Analytics allows you to track things such as campaigns, website traffic and leads, as well as where the leads have come from. This is ideal for businesses because it shows you what sort of content your target audience enjoy seeing and what content they don’t.
To find out more about which big brands are doing social media the right way and seeing the benefits, visit https://goo.gl/bueP9u.