Social media has been one of the favorite go to “digital marketing” strategy for most business. Small businesses would often create a social media account immediately. But there are times making social media accounts may not the best form of “digital marketing” for your business. Let’s dive into the world of social media and how it plays a role in your business.
From years of experience handling social media accounts, one of the strongest role of social media is not to build awareness, sell online or make announcements, can you guess what? It’s to engage with your customers.
You start out by building a community. By building a community this means, creating content that is valued by your audience. Yes, it may take time building a community from scratch, but if you are able to build the right kind of audience then you are able to effectively communicate with your target audience.
Gone are the days where brand’s measure of social ROI is the number of likes/followers. At the end of the day, what does having 100k-1M followers really mean to the business? We now have shifted to “engagement”. It’s simply measuring the interaction between the brand and customers. This means listening to the audience sentiments at the same time communicating back to the audience. But I wanted to push this a little further, how about using social media for conversion?
I have yet to see an online store which has a high conversion rate from social media channels. You would most often or not see high conversion from organic or direct source, simply because there is high intent in that area. So does this mean social media is not a good channel for selling? Not necessarily, there are areas in social media where you can make effective conversions, like: CTR’s, engagement, inquiries, etc.
Remember that social media’s main function is building and engaging with the community. It’s the only online channel where you can push content to your audience in real time. We are actually seeing live video feeds from our social media accounts, but in terms of really capitalizing on this feature is still a mystery for most brands. Social media maybe the easiest way to create your online presence, but it’s not the only online presence you should have. More of this on my next article, Why you should build your own website today.
Let us know on how you have used social media in your business!
