Social Media: 5 Benefits for Small Businesses

Posted by Tope on February 19th, 2019

Having a strong social media presence is paramount to helping your business thrive within its industry. While digital marketing might revolve around you competing for a better SERP rank, social media will kick-start your way in acquiring customers.

From fashion influencers, online merchants, local food stalls, newly-established laundry shops, and even bakeries - social media lets everyone know your business exists.

Sheryl Sandberg, one of Facebook's co-creator, pointed out that there are over 50 million small businesses using Facebook to promote their services and interact with their customers. Socialnomics 2014 survey showed that social media plays a big influence on a buyer's decision to finally buy by 93%. Insane, right?

If you haven't been on any social media platform, your business is missing out.

Here are five reasons why every small business needs social media as their digital marketing stronghold.

1. To establish a solid brand awareness

You probably have searched for a certain brand of a product by finding their Facebook page, and suddenly, ads from different brands started to show up on your feed.

Coincidence? Nope.

Paid ads are one way to get your brand known.

Creating a Facebook page, responding to tweets, updating your Youtube vlogs, adding connections on LinkedIn and uploading eye-catching pictures on Instagram will help people recognize your business.

If they like what they see from your updates, your leads will soon be inquiring about your services or products. This lets you build an online reputation, as well as build channels your customer’s trust.

In fact, a survey from Social Media Examiner published in 2015 reported that 90% of marketers are happy that their social media marketing efforts paid off, giving their businesses better exposure.

Your customers and your competitors are all in the party. Don't let your business be a wallflower.

2. To get a better ranking on the SERP

But, why do you need to be on the first page anyway?

75% of visitors won't even want to click to the next page after their results are displayed.  I bet you never did either.

Social media can indirectly contribute to taking your website from "meh" to "yeah” for ranking in SERP. Let's give it a try!".

Social Media Examiner's  2015 survey revealed that  61% of businesses spending 6 hours a week to promote their services and commodities through social media reported a positive increase in their SERP ranking.

Put it this way, social sharing directly increases the visibility of your page. Increased visibility means you may get noticed by a content creator, such as a blogger, journalist, or author. That content creator may mention it in a subsequent piece of content. If they linked to it, your page is then more likely to rank.

What’s good for social sharing is good for search!

3. To amplify your brand voice

Slogans no longer work wonders, but memes and catchy videos do.

A recent study revealed that Facebook can actually entice its users to share an online video as opposed to a text copy by 36%.  This is the reason why pages like 9GAG, The Dodo and the Daily Mail started out as a hobby page and morphed into an actual business profiting from every video they publish. Users are more likely to "react" to video content by 56% and leave comments by 36%, making it a "trend" that can harbor more attention.

Instagram's 2016 report showed that over 95 million photos and clips are shared by over 500 million users every single day.

Today, a  simple piggyback-riding from "dankest" memes and publishing a video that catches common humor can help you get more traffic. This gets better buying responses as there are only 18% of social media users trusting ads from large corporations.

Imagine being a small business coming up fresh in the game with so much engaging content to share. Your customers will know what you do, and how best you can help them.

4. To widen your audience reach while cutting costs

Social media marketing is quite the most cost-effective marketing strategy. 12 million people browse through their accounts more than twice daily. 64.9% aged around 25 - with the most ability to purchase.

Your posts can reach numerous audiences in different age brackets and locations compared to that of traditional marketing.

Using social media analytics, you can know the time most prospects are active, what device they used, which content do your customers mostly engage with and their interests.

A study conducted by Business 2 Community indicated that about 53% of businesses will recommend brands on Twitter and 50% of them will opt to buy. Of all those people who followed your Twitter account, 72% of them will likely purchase from you in the future.

5. To remarkably rack-up your conversions

Who doesn't want a constant ROI?

When the internet knows your business exists, your website ranking gets higher on the SERP. Your social media channels start getting more attention, your website gets more traffic and your lead magnets get higher conversion - you'll be getting more paying customers.

As more and more people leave reviews on your Facebook business page, subscribe to your Youtube channel, follow you on Instagram and keeps in touch with you on Twitter, making a sale would be easy as pie.

92% of businesses are dependent on social media for increasing their overall revenue. They would likely keep it as their most valuable digital marketing tool.

Conclusion

Social media is the present and the future of digital marketing. Heralding the worldwide community from trends, ideologies, and business, social media is a ground-breaking tool that keeps everyone in sync.

24% of small businesses still don't have their social media presence and are likely to go out of business due to low progress.

Are you curious about how the best digital marketing agencies utilize the best talents in social media marketing? Here's how they maximize profits with outsourcing.

If you’ve been missing out on your audience in social media, well, you’ve been missing out on conversions too!