With one in four of us using social media networks worldwide the opportunity for businesses to advertise on such platforms has become increasingly popular in recent years. As of 2013 there are 665 million daily active users on Facebook and over 500 million registered accounts on Twitter, suggesting that the use of social media to advertise a businesses services is almost expected. With this in mind I wanted to better understand the benefits of social media advertising and the value that this digital marketing strategy can hold. Here are 4 benefits for an organisation from engaging with social media marketing:
- Brand building
Social media is an excellent way to showcase a business and build a positive brand image online. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are an excellent opportunity to make an organisation accessible for new customers as well as increasing familiarity for existing ones. By creating articulate and informative social media pages for consumers to engage with, the online image of a brand is enhanced. This is because customer engagement becomes regular which leads to sharing content to an ever-growing online audience. Social media can give brand managers a powerful means to communicate their brands’ values while also letting consumers help define brand narratives in an impactful way (Botts, 2014).
- Meaningful content
By using social media to advertise a business, marketers can be specific and direct with the content they share for intended consumers. An opportunity is created to deliver content that is aligned with brand values and a target audience. This will encourage users to share and comment on relevant posts, which further increases your brand awareness as mentioned previously. For professionals and firms, adding a content element exponentially increases the value of social media efforts because expertise is knowledge based (Golden, M 2010). From this an organisation can analyse information such as most viewed, most liked and most commented on posts in order to manage future content to ensure user engagement is maximal.
- Feedback for improvement
Whilst social media provides and organisation with the opportunity to promote services, products and increase brand awareness, there is also the facility to receive feedback from customers whether positive or negative. This should also be seen as an opportunity for an organisation as a way to improve their services. For example, when a new product is launched then marketers can analyse social media responses to understand if a campaign has been successful or not. Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, talks about the importance of social media and its interaction with customers:
‘We soon found that these channels were an amazing tool for reaching our customers and the public. One of the first things we learnt was that our new social media accounts gave us a real-time view of how we could improve. Through customers comments, we started learning about issues with our products and services more quickly than ever before. In response, we set up systems so that a customer who has a question or a problem can get a quick answer from our team’.
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Further to this, the feedback and conversation facility that social media provides means organisations can improve customer service. People want to be assured that if they have a problem, they can easily find help. By being receptive to customer needs on social media, business owners can increase customer loyalty to a brand (Roesler, 2014).
- Boosting traffic
Social media channels are major generators, constantly bringing high volume of traffic to a webpage (Angelova, 2013). When quality content is created on social media then users are inclined to share information to their peers and encourage users to visit the shared pages. If an organisation creates well-designed social media platforms and adds content to compliment the social media engagement, then it is more likely to generate leads that a sales team can turn into sales. The idea is a viral spread, which is heightened by online communities and cross-pollination of content on several social media platforms (Weinberg, 2009). Below is a diagram that demonstrates the accessibility and connections that a variety of social media platforms and search engines possess.
By using social media as a key part of a marketing strategy an organisation can benefit in a number of ways. These four features discussed above are just the tip of an ice berg that digital marketers must address in order to maximise potential from their digital strategy.
References
Angelova, V. (2013) ‘7 Reasons Why Social Media is an Absolute Must for Business Branding’, 7 Reasons Why Social Media is an Absolute Must for Business Branding.
DeMers, J. (2014) The Top 10 Benefits Of Social Media Marketing. Available at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2014/08/11/the-top-10-benefits-of-social-media-marketing/ (Accessed: 16 April 2015)
Preston, J. (no date) Richard Branson – the importance of social media. Available at: http://www.virgin.com/entrepreneur/richard-branson-importance-social-media (Accessed: 16 April 2015)
Reed, A. and Botts, S. (2014) Building Identity Loyalty Through Social Media – Think with Google. Available at: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/columns/building-identity-through-social-media.html (Accessed: 16 April 2015)
Roesler, P. (2014) Inc. Available at: http://www.inc.com/peter-roesler/5-benefits-of-social-media-business-owners-need-to-understand.html (Accessed: 16 April 2015)
Weinberg, T. (2009) The new community rules: marketing on the social web. United States: O’Reilly Media, Inc, USA
