Social media today plays a major role in building a good image and reputation for startups or small businesses and also helps them to grow big.
Today social media is not only used for building personal connections with either the unknown ones or known ones. But it is also used by the companies to build a personal connection with its target group of people.
Social media is turning out to be more and more transparent for the consumers or prospects to understand the brand more than ever and significantly it is also turning out to be extremely transparent for the brand to understand its target group’s buying behavior and the psychology behind it.
Hence social media has become an integral part of every sort of marketing for any business whether small or big. For instance, advertisers use social media channels to advertise by deciding and setting the demographics of their target group of people, and public relations officials use social media influencers to convey their brand message and any sort of product reviews and feedbacks.
How social media marketing plays a vital role in brand building and sales?
- Social media channels will help you reach a wider audience including your target group of people and other people in general as the people who are not your target audience might as well become your customers. You never know because more than watching TV and doing other activities for their entertainment and knowledge, they spend time on social media.
- If we talk about Facebook, which is the world’s largest social media channel has approx, according to Statista, 2.7 billion active monthly users which are even far more than the world’s topmost populous country China which has 1.4 billion people. Therefore, millions of companies use Facebook’s business pages, which can have an unlimited no. of followers, to share organic news, events, and talk to customers.
Its advertising tool, which also gives you access to the analytics, is the best to target your ideal buyers even on Instagram as through Facebook you can also advertise on Instagram (which is nowadays trendier than Facebook), WhatsApp, and Facebook messenger. Moreover, Facebook groups are an excellent way to build a captive audience, which may, in many ways, prove more fruitful than other ways of reaching your customers.
- Youtube is another social media channel that has over 2 billion users, according to Oberlo, which makes it the second-largest social media network, after Facebook, in the world. Also, interestingly, it is the second largest search engine of course after Google.
To give you a sense of importance, according to Statista, more than 500 hours of videos are uploaded every minute to Youtube and more than 5 billion videos are watched every day on Youtube. It is almost mind-boggling to think about, right!
Google reports that 6 out of people prefer watching Youtube than TV. Hence, you as a business owner have the potential to reach an even bigger audience for a more affordable cost than on television. On mobile, higher no. of Youtube viewers are in the age group of 18 – 49. Considering the scenario, many of the TV channels in India and abroad have started their live TV streaming facility on Youtube also. Even many people in the upper-middle class and upper-class segment have entirely switched to Youtube and have not subscribed to the TV service. Maybe in the next 5 years, Tv subscriptions will go much down than we expect.
- Twitter, the popular microblogging network, is the ultimate by-the-minute news network. It is a place where you can see what’s happening every minute around the world. According to Oberlo, Twitter has 330 million monthly active users.
According to Brandwatch, more than 500 tweets are sent every day on Twitter.
Twitter is a fantastic way for you to discover what’s trending with your industry, customers, employees, partners, and prospects.
The Twitter report says, 80% of advertisers inbound social customer service requests happen on Twitter. It is also a place where people express both satisfaction and dissatisfaction regarding the products directly to the CEO of a company, making it a channel your business cannot afford to ignore.
- LinkedIn is the best platform for B2B communication and business. According to many reports, LinkedIn has over 660 million
- Social media will also help you build brand awareness. As by now you have understood how big the prominent social media channels are, you can use valuable blog posts, influencers, stories functionalities of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and many other ways and channels to convey your message and build a good brand image and trust which would drive your sales. Now you can be where your audience already is.
- Sprout social reports that when consumers follow a brand on any social media channel, 67% of the consumers are more likely to spend on the brand they follow and if possible, 78% of consumers say they will visit the physical retail store of a brand they follow.
Among the millennials, 84% of them will likely to buy from a brand they follow.
Hence the more followers you will have, the chances are more people will buy from you.
- Social media also gives you the ability to have a direct conversation with either your prospects or customers regarding anything which gives you more authenticity.
- Social media in many ways is the ultimate way to do inbound marketing which many especially small businesses are leveraging of. That’s because social media is a one to one medium which gives you and your company a chance to market in a direct but very human way.
Now you may have got the idea that why social media marketing is a boost to your start-up.
