Benefits of Social Media Marketing for Businesses

Social media marketing, or SMM, is a form of internet marketing and an effective method in gaining traffic or attention that improves your brand presence through various social media sites.

According to Statista, the number of worldwide social media users is expected to reach 2.95 billion by 2020, around a third of Earth’s entire population. And, Facebook is currently the biggest social network worldwide that has 1.71 billion monthly active users. Other social media sites might not have as many members as Facebook, but their numbers are constantly increasing.

We can’t deny that social media marketing is an effective marketing strategy for businesses to connect with existing and potential customers across the internet. These key benefits will show you how important it is for your business to start investing in social media marketing.

Drive more website traffic

Social Media is one of the best ways to promote your website. Sharing relevant and compelling content on social media will attract users and will probably like or share your content on their own social networks. This serves as a reason for them to click and visit your website builds domain authority and improves organic search rankings therefore generating more traffic to the website. Google and Bing pay attention to social signals like this when deciding how to rank links on the search results page.

Increases brand awareness

Social media marketing is a powerful marketing tool to introduce your brand to social media users whilst building brand awareness. Through social media, businesses can showcase their products/services, post promotional activities, and share images, videos, news, updates, and events to gain attention and awareness from potential customers.

A study by SocialMediaToday reveals that 83% of customers prefer to connect to the brand on Facebook and 53% on Twitter. A study by Nielsen also reported that 46% of online users count on social media while making purchase decisions and 50% of shoppers made purchases based on the recommendations on social media websites.

Improves brand loyalty

Social media plays an essential role in building more meaningful and longer relationships with customers that bring a unique value proposition to brands. Using multiple platforms at the same time successfully builds loyalty from wide-ranging audiences.

Better Customer Service

More often than not, social media acts as conversation channels for businesses thus providing a better service through interacting directly with their customers. It helps businesses to answer queries and resolve problems and negative feedback right away.According to Social Media Examiner, responding quickly and appropriately to negative social comments can help you increase customer loyalty and retention. Sproutsocial also shows that 42% of respondents expect a response within an hour. 32% of respondents expect a response within 30 minutes.

Increase Sales

In the end, social media marketing plays an important role in generating leads and thus increasing sales to all kinds of businesses. According to Social Media Examiner, 92% of marketers say social media is important to their business. More than half of marketers who've been using social media for at least two years have helped them improve their sales.