Social media can be a scary thing for people who have never used it or rarely do now but there is some very good reasons to stick with it and try to grow your audience. Businesses today are embracing social media as a form of advertising and building up their own brand.
Here is top 5 reasons why this can benefit your business:
Save on advertising
If your a small business or your just starting out you wont have a lot of money towards advertising so finding the right platform to share your business is really important and needs to be free.
That is were platforms like Facebook come in useful as if you can imagine you post an advert on your own business page you can then share it and get friends to share and then they share it and before long people will notice it on a friends timeline and get in touch.
Also Facebook has groups that are focussed on helping others to promote their businesses for FREE and through this exchange of business promotion people can help you to share your business. Look for groups by searching for 'local businesses' or 'UK businesses'. Depending on what platform you want to use to advertise your business you might have to pay a little to get noticed more.
Communication
Having multiple means of contact really allows your customers to reach you easily and for you to build up a relationship. Social media has become the new way to keep in touch with people without the direct contact to specific people e.g. people on your phone list are the only ones that you can contact.
So when it comes to businesses being online, having multiple ways to be contacted allows customers on any platform to reach you. Instant messaging or prompt replying can build up a good customer service reputation and even if its a complaint handling it swiftly can be spun into a good thing. But having the means to be contacted easily is VERY important.
Branding
Your name and your brand is something that all business big and small try to create rememberable. By creating a logo unique or simple you will find people will learn to associate a certain product with a brand also through the value the companies share often reflects the type of brand they are.
For example a clothing company that are co-friendly will promote this point of there brand to show the world they care about the environment but don't worry not all brands are committed to this kind of thing.
Larger audience
At the moment if you think about it there is more online business than there every used to be as we become more technology focussed. If at the moment you get business word of mouth or through referrals that brilliant. But your audience is limited to one area and a certain amount of people.
However, to put it in perspective imagine the reach Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn have atm with over 1 billion users monthly who are active. So out of all those active users, you narrow it down to a group of people who actively look for or need a service either local or international.
Your business can grow from using this audience size with recommendations and having that engagement can change your business.
Building relationship
This is a very key reason to utilise social media platforms. By paying attention to what peoples interests are, their needs and connecting with like minded people you can create good relationships with people who might use your services or possibly refer.
Maintaining these types of relationships and building on them can take a-lot of time and dedication as it won't happen overnight. It will take commenting, likes, following certain people to start to gain more exposure and more interesting your business, but keep it up daily and try and engage on all platforms even for 10 mins a day.
Hope you have found this useful and i will be posting more dedicated business advice and tips to help you with your own business growth.
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