The Internet and particularly social media have opened the world of global interactions.
It is not a problem anymore to keep in touch with friends and relatives from other parts of the world. Social networking sites have grown to global societies of billions of virtual inhabitants. Facebook itself has 2.4 billion users making it one of the biggest communities in the world (bigger than China’s population!).
Our planet has just become smaller and more approachable, not only in personal, but also business interactions.
- Social Networking Makes Relationships More Personal
Social media is a two-way channel where you have an opportunity to build a rapport with your clients and prospects. These platforms are not about amazing sales pitch you deliver to the audience.
Social networking is all about interactions and an open dialogue with users. Social media helps you humanize a brand and build genuine relationships with your community. It shortens the distance from your audience, especially when you address them from personal accounts.
- You Can Promote Your Business More Effectively
78 percent of small businesses attract new customers through social media.
The most common way to promote a business on social networking sites is advertising.
Thanks to the advanced options of targeting and remarketing you are able to address the message to the audience that would more likely be interested in your products and services. Facebook and Twitter paid advertising is relatively cheap and with a well-knitted social media strategy your efforts will pay off.
However, paid advertising is not the only way to reach out to target customers. A more time-consuming, but effective method to get a new customments
- Social Networking Induces Loyalty
According to a report published by Texas Tech University, brands which regularly engage in social media conversations tend to observe an increased brand loyalty.
When your company is present on social networking sites you are more approachable and reliable in the eyes of customers and prospects.
This is directly connected to the first point of this article. If you can build more personal and genuine relationships with a community, customers will be less likely to switch between brands. Showing them a human face will make you a sort of their friend rather than just another company that sells good products and that is replaceable. Remember that it is comes much easier to swap a service provider, but can be harder to dump a close mate.
- Social Media Increases Website Traffic
Finally, social networking presence is essential in attracting traffic to your website. Not only it directly drives traffic to a page, but it also improves search ranking. As you probably know, SEO is an enduring and laborious process that helps you get to the top of Google’s search results. External links, number of visits, selected keywords and website content have an impact on how well you turn out against your competitors in search engines. Social media can help you improve these factors, both thanks to direct traffic, but also shared links through social media users’ profiles.