10 Reasons Why Your Company Needs Social Media

Even if your customers aren’t there

1. Social Media Activity Affects Your Company’s Performance in Search Results

If you invest in creating content, it would be incredibly embarrassing not to get it in the search results. Every day, social networks play an increasing role in the display of web pages in search engines.

It turns out that search engines use fragments of actions on social networks (for example, when someone “shares” the content of your page on Twitter) to determine the relevance and level of reliability of your site. That is, the more people on a social network that “vote” for your content, the better the display of your site becomes.

Zlata VerzhbitskaiaApril 9, 2020

Allow people to vote on your content. Publish articles, e-books, customer guides, research in your field, reviews of other consumers, and anything that may seem interesting, and then reap the benefits of the search results.

2. You Can Monitor the Image of the Company on the Internet More Closely

Speaking of ranking on search engines, the support for your brand’s activities on social networks allows you to significantly influence the display performance and improve the company’s reputation (or to start creating it). Let’s say that a person learned about your company, and he was curious who you are, what you do, and how nice you are to work with. If you tried to type the name of your company into Google right now, what result would you get?

Wouldn’t it be better for you to increase the influence of your social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and LinkedIn to handle the advantages of third-party review sites that you have almost no control over? Your appearance on social platforms will also, once again, make the curious people interested and lead them to your pages in search of great content.

3. User-Generated Content Is More Important than Ever

According to eMarketer, 65% of users aged 18–24 trust the information about a brand that they find on the Internet when buying a certain product. According to eConsultancy, two-thirds of consumers (an incredibly high amount) use search engines when making a purchase decision. The chances that your target audience belongs to one of these groups are extremely high. Social media is a great way to get that desired user content and address it to the group of people that needs it.

 4. You Will Strengthen Your Influence in the Industry

Let’s say your customers aren’t among the two-thirds of users who pay a lot of attention to what’s written about you on the Internet. Let’s even say they’re not among the 65% of Generation Y who consider your online presence to be vital. They are still your colleagues, opinion leaders, conference organisers, future employees, potential business partners, journalists, marketers, and PR professionals who use social media daily. These people expect that they will not only be able to find you on social networks but also learn more about you and start communicating with you through the same social platforms. Frankly, you should expect the same from them.

Use social networks to make connections that will help your business grow. Explore other people, look for opportunities for dialogue, find event sponsors, and more. Social networks can give you the influence and visible presence you need to be recognised and chosen for special occasions. This is especially important if your competitors have not yet taken a winning position in social media.

5. Other Companies’ Consumers Are Present on Social Media

Let’s continue talking about finding new opportunities. Other companies’ clients use social networks. Consider whether the products or services you offer are interconnected with what other companies offer. Maybe their audience is a new part of the market for you that you haven’t covered yet.

Analysing the presence of these companies on the internet—and on social networks, in particular—will only benefit you. Share content with them, build relationships, interact with them, and create special content for the target audience and the companies themselves. You will win new customers with whom you can build partnerships, get recommendations, and discover a whole new circle of people to whom you can sell your products or services.

6. Social Networks Increase Overall Reach

Let’s divide the importance of market coverage for your company into several parts, look at each of them, and explain the use of social media.

Outreach implies that all your fans and readers have their own fans and readers. If one of your Twitter followers has more than a hundred followers, then sending them a tweet with a link to your blog entry will increase the outreach of your blog by these hundred followers, many of whom have not even heard of you yet. Even if one of your Twitter followers is not your target audience, there is still a chance that one of his hundreds of followers is either already a fan of yours or will be in the future.

There is another plus to having a wide coverage through social networks. Do you remember that at the beginning of this article we talked about the role of social media in search results? That’s why you need incredibly wide coverage on the internet. Even if your readers never become consumers of your services or products, they will still be able to share your content among themselves and increase the number of those who see your content. Do not forget that for search engines, these shares serve as an indicator that determines how important your page is and displays mentions of you at the top of search results.

It is for this reason that HubSpot encourages employees to be active on social media—so that they increase their reach. They congratulate their employees through social networks, many of them provide links to HubSpot content in their tweets, and thousands of people who are not fans of the company learn about it and access its content. Each individual employee in the company can present you with their personal database of customers, even if the employee is not engaged in sales or marketing.

7. It Is Much Cheaper to Search for Customers Through Social networks

One way to measure the effectiveness of a marketing strategy is to calculate the ratio of the cost of attracting potential consumers to the value of those consumers and customers to your business. This method may not be suitable for some types of companies, but it is very important to remember the scenario described below.

Let’s say that investing in social media leads you to one new customer per month. Compare these costs with other methods you use to attract the same one customer. For example, the cost of attracting one customer through email is much higher than the cost of attracting new people through social networks. For email, you need special software, staff to maintain it, and many man-hours to create content. At the same time, for a marketing strategy using social platforms, you do not need special equipment and or extra money, and the work takes only a few man-hours per week.

Yes, emailing can provide you with more customers than social networks, but you need to use both tools in the appropriate amount because both of these strategies are key components in the development of your business. Sometimes the use of social networks is considered a waste of time, but that’s because that marketers often fixate on different metrics for assessing the number of likes and comments instead of focusing on the ultimate goal of the entire marketing mix: to attract new consumers.

8. Social Networks Increase the Effectiveness of Other Marketing Activities

Even if you do not count on the effectiveness of social networks in attracting new customers and consumers, their use will still increase the effectiveness of other marketing activities. Social networks and their active use help in all areas: they improve your position in search results and increase the impact of emails, blog posts, and various events online and offline.

Here’s an example. You can add social media “share” button to your mailing list or blog posts, inviting your audience to share the content with their readers and increase the outreach. You can also use social networks to draw attention to a live online meeting or event and use hashtags to attract an audience.

9. By the Time You’re Ready, It May Be too Late

You may not be ready to take advantage of social media just yet, but it would be unreasonable to assume that your potential audience does not use it or will not use it in the future. You will probably appreciate all the benefits of social platforms and become active users in the future.

Do not forget about the predicament you can get into if you do not hurry. It’s better to protect yourself today and make suitable accounts on social networks before competitors with a similar name or a common field of activity do it first.

10. Social Network Users that You Haven’t Previously Considered Seriously Can Become Your Target Audience

People change with time, and the audience on social networks also goes through changes in their lives: jobs, activities, hobbies, acquaintances, religious or political views, children, marriage, divorce, retirement. You get what I mean.

You can change too. Your company may begin to offer new services, expand its product line, find new opportunities in your niche, or be so successful in using social media that you grow a new audience that feels the need for your products or services.