Benefits of Social Media Presence for Small Businesses

The importance of social media presence for any type or size of the business is no longer debatable. Firms that are yet to embrace this crucial marketing strategy are losing out big time. It is something that small business owners ought to consider at the earliest opportunity. Here are incredible benefits reaped from integrating social media into the wider marketing strategy of a small business.

1. Valuable customer insights

Social media comes in handy when it comes to gaining important information about customers from tweets on Twitter, status updates on Facebook and photos uploaded to Instagram and Pinterest, there is basically so much customer data that one can pick. The stats for interaction alone are absolutely amazing, Tweets were approximated at 500 million, Facebook likes were 4.5 billion and 9.5 million photos were uploaded on Instagram. Social media has taken the world of information by storm. Social media allows business owners the ability to understand their customers much better. For instance, you get to know who they are, their tastes and preferences as well as their feelings and perception about your brand. With this kind of information, it becomes easy to design products that are in line with the needs of a target market and audience.

2. Brand awareness and loyalty

We’ve established that social media provides an excellent platform for small businesses to find and connect with customers. Through these interactions, small enterprises can make their brand known to the members of any target market. It provides an amazing opportunity to show consumers why they should stick with their brand. Eventually, customer retention and profitable brand loyalty become easy to achieve and maintain.

3. Marketing costs

Small business owners dread the rising costs associated with marketing and advertising activities. Unfortunately, with competition becoming increasingly intense, a company can hardly survive without engaging in productive marketing. As such, businesses are left with one option - finding easy and effective ways of minimizing marketing costs without sacrificing the realization of the overall goals of the business. Social media presence offers an excellent solution as far as cost is concerned. It is an advanced, yet affordable platform for advertisements.

4. Customer service

Customer service is the kind of service given to customers, before, during and after a purchase. The most successful businesses place utmost importance on the kind of customer service they offer. A small business that doesn’t have the right strategies in place to provide world class customer service is undoubtedly setting themselves up for failure. Firms can take advantage of their social media presence to offer another avenue of customer service. For instance, if a consumer has a question or complaint, and communicates with your business online, through social media, such presents an opportunity to showcase the highest level of professionalism and service delivery.

Generally speaking…a digital footprint for any business or brand will give said business the ability to attain a competitive advantage over its rivals – given all the benefits involved.