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Benefits of social media | For business, agenciesand brands

The benef its of social media f or brands and businesses can sometimes be lost under atorrent of generic blog posts, clouded business aims and a general lack ofunderstanding on some of the more obscure benef its of social media.

Some of the major benef its of running a consistent and strategized social networkingcampaign can be hidden, but are no less important that the main KPI’s set by mostbusinesses – sales revenue, return on investment, number of f ollowers…

See Also: When to post on Social Media, and who to target

From brand awareness to driving sales, the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram et alcan all and should play a major part of your digital marketing strategy. So here are someof the key benef its of social media f or business:

Gaining trust

Creating brand awareness

Controlled PR outlet

Search engine optimisation

Increasing web traf f ic

Competitions and f an engagement

Generating sales

To be entertaining!

Gaining Trust

In 2013 we undertook our own research, the 60 Second Social Media Study, to f ind outwhat ef f ect social media has on consumers online purchasing habits.

We asked our participants whether or not they would check out a brands social mediapresence before making a purchase, particularly if they had not heard of or purchasedf rom that website before.

Nearly 50% of respondents said they were “likely” or “more than likely” to inspect abrands social media presence, with just 11% saying they wouldn’t be interested in doingso.

They gave the f ollowing reasons as to why they would check out that websites socialmedia presence:

Nearly half of all respondents who said they would look to inspect a companies socialmedia presence said they would check to see how popular a brand is, with nearly 20%saying the more f ollowers that brand has on social media, the more trustworthy it mustbe.

The results show a strong link between having a strong and successful social mediapresence and the amount of trust consumers have towards your product and brand.

If you see 100 adverts f or a new car insurance website on TV that you had not heard ofbefore, you are more likely to trust that website, and this is the online equivalent. If yousee, in passing through your social network streams, a brand name mentioned over andover again, you are more likely to trust its products and services. This is one of thegreat benef its of social media.

And although the number of f ollowers on Twitter or Facebook doesn’t appear to directlyinf luence a buying decision, the more f requently you post, interact with customers andgain f ollowers, the more signals you will be sending to the consumer that you are areputable, large and trustworthy company.

Creating brand awareness

One of the key aims of many who use social media f or business purposes is to createbrand awareness.

Everyone f rom River Island to individuals with personal Etsy accounts use Facebook,Pinterest and in particular Twitter to promote their websites, blogs and products.

Why? Because social media is a f ree tool, and you can gain thousands of f ans andengage with millions of would be customers.

Twitter in particular has grown as one of the most important social media tools f orbusinesses. Going back to our own social media study, 82% of respondents said socialmedia was important f or their business, with 76% saying the main objective of socialmarketing was to promote their brand.

And their main tool of choice? Over 46% said Twitter was the most important socialnetwork f or their business.

Using your business Twitter account and other social networks as a PR outlet (more onthis later) will help with brand awareness, but using Twitter in the right way can help toincrease your companies notoriety on the micro-blogging site as well.

With 70% of US retailers saying they manage to generate sales directly f rom theirTwitter accounts, the more awareness the better, and techniques such as monitoringtrending topics is a great way to reach as many people as possible.

For example, if you are a f ood company and you notice that #Valentines is trending, atweet saying “try our f ood f or the best romantic #Valentines Day ever!” will ensure yourmessage is, potentially, read by thousands of people, even if you only have 10 f ollowers.

Lists topics such as, sticking with our f ood company, “the best f ood bloggers” or “ourf avourite suppliers” can generate quite a bit of interest too.

Failing this, simply f ollow as many relevant people as you can. If they f eel your prof ile isrelevant to them, they will also f ollow you back. Twitter generally has a great nature off ollowing people back, especially on Follow Fridays, the weekly event where users alerttheir f riends to prof iles they should be f ollowing.

A good Twitter account will also show up in search engine results when your companyname is Google’d or Yahoo’d, and the more f ollowers and interactions you have on youraccount the better.

New customers will trust a company with a huge social f ollowing over a company with nosocial outlets at all.

Controlled PR outlet

When businesses come under social pressure, have an issue or need to communicatewith their customers quickly, social media is quite of ten the f irst port of call f or animpromptu message or link to a press release.

In 2013 when the major energy f irms conf irmed they were to raise their prices, BritishGas announced their Customer Services Manager Bert Pijls would talk to their customerson Twitter.

Although the response was a vehement and f renzied hatred storm of 16,000+ tweetsf rom customers and other Twitter users, Pijls was (in some sort of ) control, and directedthousands of Twitter users to a press release on the website explaining the reasonsbehind the price hike.

The benef it of social media f or the spectator on this occasion was that we got to enjoysome entertaining tweets on how some Twitter users planned to save on their energybills, such as “Dear British Gas, is it cheaper f or one to burn £20 notes instead of puttingon the heating this winter?”

However, one online expert described the company’s attempt to ease public anger overthe new tarif f s as one of the biggest PR own goals he had ever seen.

This was a rather extreme example, but even on a lower, more simplistic level, socialmedia is a great tool to convey the brand image and messages you want. Even if therest of the world is slating your brand, or your customer service, or your prices, on yourown social media networks at least, you are still the best business in the world.

Search engine optimisation (SEO)

There are two things that go intertwined here – SEO andcontent marketing.

Traditionally, links on social media directed to yourwebsite shouldn’t ef f ect search rankings, but the Googlelandscape has changed drastically over 2013 and socialsignals are becoming more of a f actor. In f act, accordingto a number of senior digital marketers, social signals arenow Google’s search ranking f actor of choice.

You post a link to a product page or blog post on Twitter,and your f ollowers engage with it and retweet it, thuscreating more links. As social media links are a lot harderto manipulate, Google now sees these as the link juice of choice when determiningrankings f or websites.

But this is good news f or businesses. Although traditional SEO in terms of on-siteoptimisation are still ef f ective, sharing your content on social media gets you what youwanted in the f irst place – more website traf f ic, and more potential customers. Only nowGoogle is starting to say “Well done on creating that popular post on Facebook. Letsreward you with a better search ranking to go with all those extra clicks and views yougot”.

Google Plus is probably the most intriguing case here. The search-engine giant has beenpushing its relatively new social network as hard as it can in a bid to rival Facebook et al.You now need a Google Plus page to comment on YouTube f or example.

But links shared on Google’s network last longer in search results, and f or those whofollow you on Google Plus, the chances of your content ranking highly in their Googlesearches increases dramatically.

And this all links into the next topic…

Increasing web traff ic

The President of BuzzFeed, Jon Steinberg,said last year that online publishers shouldmove away f rom an SEO-approach to contentcreation and f ocus on social sharing toincrease traf f ic.

Steinberg suggested that gaining the attentionof young readers was vital, and that socialmedia was the place to f ind them.

“You have to write and produce news f or thesocial web: it has to be novel, important andhave this social imperative behind it,” he toldthe MIPCOM conference in Cannes.

“SEO focused content allowed people to writevery boring news that was aggregated and unoriginal, and that doesn’t work well onsocial. The most important thing you can do is to think to yourself , ‘why would somebodyshare this content?’”

“And that’s high quality content.”

So whilst social shares will also help your SEO ef f orts, it can drastically increase thenumber of visitors to your website.

Let us use BuzzFeed as an example. The website publishes articles that of ten havevery litt le text that can be optmised f or search, and are extremely dependant on images,embedded tweets and moving GIFs.

But despite this, in August last year alone the website drew 85 million unique visitors –70% of which were derived f rom social links.

However this strategy can’t work f or all businesses. If you sell paper clips, it would bedif f icult to write engaging content and top ten lists about paper clips that would beshared on social media thousands of times. Traditional SEO does have a place still!

Competitions and fan engagement

Customers love social media because they can interact with brands, and brands lovesocial media because they can entice their customers into thinking about, talking aboutand discussing them.

Competitions are a great way in which businesses can increase f an engagement andpromote awareness, whether you are a start-up looking to reach 100 f ollowers or aconglomerate of powerful retailers looking to promote a new product.

(Click to enlarge)

Heineken is one huge brand that uses competitions well, this time on Instagram. Thebeer f irm took things to a whole new creative level with their scavenger huntercompetition, in which the user must f ind clues in a mosaic of images to win tickets to theUS Open f inal.

Competitions are always a great way to promote your brands awareness and popularitywithout straight-ball advertising, and your online f ollowing can expand massivelydepending on the quality of the prize.

But asking the entrant to do more than simply like and share something creates agreater brand engagement, and promotes more interest.

Whilst competitions play a large part of f an engagement, companies can of f er a lotmore in the way of interacting with their f ans.

It has long been said by industry experts that every brand on social media need apersonality behind the brand logo whilst posting online, and f an engagement is a perf ectexample of giving your page personality.

Red Bull are agreat advocate f orthis, and as well aspromoting its ownhigh-octane imagesin promotion of itsenergy drinks, theaccount will of tenlike its f ans imageswhich representpeople “gettingtheir wings”, suchas high adrenalinesports.

It can of ten be dif f icult f or business leaders to see the benef it of putting time andmoney into social media such as Instagram. Yet whilst 70% of businesses say they f indcustomers through social media, a lot of it is to do with a brands popularity andawareness.

Fans of certain brands will remain loyal if they provide quality content to their socialstreams, and in return are more likely to click onto the latest product releases, and payattention when you must become more sales oriented.

Having a selection of accounts, f rom Facebook to Twitter, and YouTube to Instagramhelps reach the largest audience possible, and increase brand awareness even f urther.You can create a mosaic of business driven outlets, to which you control the content,tone and message, and reach a much larger and more engaged audience than simpleadvertising alone.

Generating sales

I lef t sales generation towards the end f or a good reason. For brands that are solelylooking to promote and sell their own products on social media, they are more than likelyto f ind it a struggle to engage and attract interest.

However, with a large and engaged social f ollowing, one of the great benef its of socialmedia networking is that your f ollowers will click on your links, and buy your products.

Unfortunately f or a lot of business managers new to social media marketing, the worldof black and white KPI’s means creating awareness, brand recognition and trust onlineare secondary to sales. A nice side-product perhaps, but without an ROI they f ail to seethe point in the time and money invested in a sustained social media presence.

But with 70% of retailers f inding custom and generating sales via Twitter, the generalequation is this – the more work you put into your social media, the more f ans,awareness, engagement and sales you will get out of it. The benef its of social media f oryour business directly correlates to the amount of time you put in.

The general rule on Twitter is to tweet in thirds – one 3rd linking to your products andpushing the hard sell, one 3rd about the company and what else it is up to, and the last3rd about stuf f completely unrelated to your company and the industry.

Tweeting to that f ormat will ensure that by the time you get round to tweeting links toyour products in the hope of driving sales, your customers wont be so f ed up with yourprof ile that they’ve unfollowed you.

If your brand is big enough it can be an idea to develop separate Twitter accounts f ordif f erent departments. Tesco, f or example, have numerous accounts f ocused on sellingmedia products, then f ood, then wines and so on. But they also have an account,@Tesco, purely dedicated to interacting with customers and helping with their enquiries.

By doing this your customers will know exactly what they are getting when they f ollowyou.

Be entertaining!

As the President of BuzzFeed would suggest, be entertaining – that’s what social mediais supposedly all about. You should blend in to stand out on social networks – tweet as ifyou are an actual human being, not a tweet generating robot, and the f ans will come.

Why? Because so many brands are yet to f igure out how to be human online, and whenthey try it can of ten be painful to read.

See Also: 5 Manchester venues with great social media

Be f unny, be adventurous, be brave, and be a bit controversial when the time is right!Maybe even have a rap battle with one of your major competitors on Twitter like O2 andTesco Mobile did!

Benefits of social media summary

So, 2409 words later, I hope to have persuaded you towards an understanding of thebenef its of social media, and showed it is an extremely important tool f or brands andbusinesses. It should make up a good chunk of any marketing strategy in the f uture.

Do you work f or a brand, own a business, small or large, and need help f ine-tuning oreven setting up a social media presence? Visit our Contact Us page and drop us amessage!

Oh, and f ollow us on Twitter @FabricAgency!

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