Most entrepreneurs and small companies wonder how to generate greater impact on their audience and how to reach potential customers that may be outside their local area. Social media can offer a great way to get in touch with them and benefit from the possible feedback and communication that is activated through these channels.
There are clear benefits that can be achieved through the creation of pages, blogs, and events you can share on social media networks. Here are some aspects that must be considered when starting to work with social media.
Increased traffic to Your Website
This is one of the main benefits of investing time, money and effort into the social media platform of your business. Increasing exposure means more visibility; it means getting more views and more people to try your products and services. As simple as this, if your business does not have a window nobody will ever see what you have to offer, social media is a window to the world, not only to your local street.
There are several ways to increase the traffic to your site. Twitter, for instance, is excellent to share content using short and provocative texts that get the reader’s attention, so they are inspired to check out your quality content. Remember that adding quality content is the first requirement for successful social media investment. The audience that is attracted to your content is always looking for uniqueness, creativity, and updated information. Make sure you offer it, and they will surely return.
Enhanced Relationship with Customers
Pages, forums, groups, and events give the opportunity to people to contact you more often. Customers have valuable insights that can be easily shared through a comment section or a video response. You can also offer great customer support if your clients feel they can reach you and have you listen to their concerns, complaints, and comments.
It can be a little fuzzy at the beginning; from the various sources of connection between you and your clients that are available right now, you have to choose the one that suits your business better. If you do not know how to start a blog or how to run a customer support page, there are teams of experts always willing to give you a hand.
Lead Generation
As the business grows and gets involved in social media, leads can also grow about 50% faster when compared to not using social media at all. Remember that it is not only about getting names and phone numbers; leads have to be interested in what you are doing. Good quality leads are engaged in what you do and have a need for what you offer.
Measuring Social Media ROI
Once the social media machinery has been set into motion, it is necessary to measure how effective it is. It can be a little difficult to measure ROI (Return on Investment) because there is no direct button to calculate this. There are, however, certain tools that allow the media team to calculate how people are interacting with the resources given. Campaigns need to engage the audience and make them like, comment and follow directions so as to be considered successful.
Negative Customer Reviews
It is a very simple equation, the more visible and reachable your business is the more exposed and vulnerable to negative reviews is going to be. Negative reviews are many times visible to other customers that may be using and interacting with your pages and websites, this can be potentially harmful if not treated carefully.
Complaints and comments have to be read and answered, most of the times customers just want to be heard and to feel their opinions are taken into account. Make sure to channel their voices so as to control the impact they may have on the rest of the audience.
Daily Monitoring
Having a site, page or app needs special and daily monitoring for all the interactions that are going to occur. One of the characteristics of this new and modern era of communication is that everything happens fast and people are used to having answers and results immediately. If the group of the company is left alone for a couple of days the next time you read the analytics, you’ll notice how interaction plummeted, and you may have lost a few members.
Several tools can make monitoring easier for you or your social media team. From Google Analytics to HootSuite, the options are varied and offer multiple ways of obtaining and interpreting the interaction of the people. Depending on the area that you want to tackle you may want to use one social media platform or another, Facebook may be great to share events, Pinterest if you want a more visual approach or LinkedIn for a business style vision.
Regardless of the social media platform that you prefer to use to approach your audience and potential clients, it is vital to remember that there must be a team in charge of monitoring and analyzing the behavior of the pages so as to understand how deep the impact of your business is.
