SOCIAL MEDIA FOR BUSINESS

There has been a lot written about social media and its benefits for business, but I would like to go over a few simple reasons why we feel dipping your toe into the water might be worthwhile. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn are some of the popular social media providers you might use for your business.

 

Audience

Social media is widely used by a large, diverse group of people, so the potential audience and exposure is vast. With over 2 billion active users, Facebook is currently the most popular social networking site, so clearly there is an audience. (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook).

YouTube can be considered the visual Google and is a great way to advertise products. As the saying goes, a picture paints a thousand words and demonstrating your products here can be invaluable.

 

Proactive Exposure

A huge advantage of services like Facebook and Twitter is the fact they push information onto the pages of their subscribers. This means you do not have to wait for them to return to your website or business to know what’s new. This is perhaps the key point, as the only other way to get such exposure is to pay for it through pay-per-click. Details of a sale or new product can gain quick, immediate and often free exposure. You can also advertise on social media as well, increasing the exposure of existing pay-per-click campaigns and generating potential new subscribers, if your target audience are strong social media users.

 

Search Engine Rankings

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) professionals often talk about backlinks (links back to your site from others) as a good way to improve rankings on search results. Social media posting is a good way to generate these backlinks and exposure. It also helps in an affordable way, especially for small business, to regularly publish new information. Search engines such as Google can score a visibly active business well when it comes to rankings. Ensuring you use embedded Google tracking on your website and use links back to your website from your social media can help search engines track the number of visitors and get a clearer picture of traffic.

 

Do it Yourself

Publishing to a website might involve a web developer and cost money for every update. That’s understandable, it can be a complicated thing. However, posting to social media can be easy, quick and can have instant results once you develop a good follower base. If you don’t have the time or aren’t confident, your web developer can help you start, or maintain your social media presence for you.

 

Not for Everyone?

Although most businesses could benefit in some way, the results will vary and depend on so many factors. For example, Twitter is a text based short message social media service, handy for fast news or topic-based conversation. If there isn’t much to post about in your business, it might look somewhat stale if months go by without anything new or of value to say. You need something of value or interesting to your target audience to both attract and keep their attention.

If you don’t think you can publish content of value, then our favourite adage may apply - “It's better not to have it, rather than have it empty”.

To see the other articles visit www.awe.net.au/articles