Everyone and anyone is using social media these days for personal use but recently more and more businesses are coming round to the idea that Social Media is important for growing their company. There’s no doubt that social media is having an increasing influence on how branders and marketers work. Some companies are already tapping into this emerging marketing tool while others are still struggling to keep up.
SEO Optimization
There is evidence to suggest that using social media can improve your website’s search engine rankings and increase traffic to your website. Search engines like Google are constantly updating ways in which they rank websites. Social media is becoming more important as an SEO signal. Being talked about and mentioned on social media is a good sign to search engines that your company is popular which will bump up your page rankings.
Adding to this, a simple Google search of your business’ name will bring up links to your company’s social media pages (if you have them) which is why it’s so important to keep them updated with relevant information. Potential clients, customers and peers will have easy access your social media pages. They will make judgements about your company in a matter of seconds. So just like your website, make sure your social pages are up to date and has content that’s worth reading.
Further to this, adding Social Media buttons to your website will also make it more visible in search engines.
Lead Creation
Social Media is a great way to connect with other businesses and engage with existing and potential clients. With over 240 million active monthly users on twitter, over 1.2 billion monthly active Facebook members and over 300 million users on LinkedIn there’s no shortage of opportunity to connect.
In 2011 1.8 billion leads were created on LinkedIn (which incidentally makes it 300% more effective than Facebook and Twitter for lead generation). Positive connections can no doubt ultimately lead to more business for you and your company.
Your social media followers can often be worth more than visitors to your web site because most people will check their Facebook and Twitter feeds daily. This means, if you keep your social media updated, people who follow you will look at what content you’re sharing more often and are therefore more likely to buy your products or recommend you.
Connections with Employees
Although your Social Media pages may not serve as places to sell, they can be great platforms for employee engagement. Most companies, regardless of the industry or the location will have employees that are active on various forms of Social Media. This is great because it means you can communicate with your employees and more importantly your employees can communicate with each other. This can create a community spirit within your organisation which not only keeps your employees happy but also looks good for outsiders looking in.
Peer Pressure
Your employees are doing it, so why aren’t you?
With Social Media barely being around for a decade it’s easy to understand why you might think it’s not that important to keep up with. But it’s growing so fast that you don’t want to be left behind.
You can learn a lot about your industry by looking at content that’s being shared by other industry experts. More than that you can keep an eye on your peers and competitors. You can use their activity to see where you might be going wrong or right. Monitoring competitor Social Media accounts can be the easiest and most effective way to keep up to date!
Education
If you’re still not convinced that your company needs to be active on Social Media then here’s one last point to try and convince you.
You’re passionate about your industry right? So why shouldn’t everyone else be? Just because you might think your business could be too niche or uninteresting for the wider market there’s no reason that people outside your industry can’t learn about it.
If you’re the leaders in your field or even if you’re not, you will have a lot of information and expertise that other people won’t. If you use your social media platforms to their full potential and share your information and knowledge in places like Twitter & Facebook, literally millions of people will have access to it.