Reasons Why Businesses Need to Build a Strong Presence on Social Media

Social media is an outstanding tool for businesses, and can actually be one of the most valuable assets for any business – big or small.

Why is this so, we shall soon see.

A few days back, we did a post on this blog on how businesses can develop an effective social media strategy. And while that post does list down a number of tips and ways which businesses can use to create a strong and effective social media presence, today’s post deals with why doing so is so important for businesses.

So without further ado, here is a list of reasons why businesses need to (and should) commit resources for, and focus on building a strong presence on social media:

 

Reason # 1: Social media is terrific for spreading the word

Information on social media is being consumed by billions of people. Yes, that’s billions, with a ‘b’!

Let’s have a look at the numbers:

Facebook:

• There are more than 1 billion active users on Facebook alone…
• … And as many as 618 million active users!
• 1 Million websites have integrated with Facebook
• 23% of users check Facebook 5 times or more daily

Twitter:

• More than 500 million users, with a 150,000 new users every day!
• 340 million tweets are sent out daily – which amounts to almost 4000 tweets per second! Whoa!

Google Plus:

• Google+ crossed the 500 million mark last year, and is the second biggest social network after Facebook.
• Almost half of those are active users.
• 625,000 new users sign up for Google Plus every day!
• Google’s +1 button is used 5 million times a day.

YouTube

• Youtube handles millions of seaech queries per day, making it the second largest search engine in the world (after you-know-who of course!).
• More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month
• Over 4 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
• 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute

And these stats don’t even consider the likes of LinkedIn, Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest, among others!

What businesses then end up with, is a MASSIVE platform to get the word out and market their products, their services and themselves to people belonging to all kinds of different demographics!

And that too for free!

 

Reason # 2: There is tons of potential for businesses

Consider these stats:

• Almost half of online customers expect brands to provide customer service on Facebook, but only 23% provide it.
• 56% of customer tweets are being ignored
• 40% Twitter users don’t even tweet themselves, but still use Twitter to follow other people’s tweets.
• In 2012, 83% of the global Pinterest users were women.

What do all these stats have in common? They represent potential for businesses in one form or the other.

For instance, half your your customers are expecting you to provide support via Facebook, yet only a small percentage of businesses are doing it.

Furthermore, according to stats, Pinterest has a large percentage of female users, which represents a massive potential for businesses catering to the female demographic.

And the best part is that as we saw above, all social networks are growing – some more than others – with more and more people turning to social networks. This means that you have the opportunity to attract new customers and generate new leads for your business every single day!

 

Reason # 3: Social media is lead-generation heaven

Stat attack: 34% of marketers have generated leads on Twitter.

And I’m sure the numbers on Facebook are even better!

The simple fact here is this: social media is a free tool that you can use to generate leads, and get more business. This SalesForce article, for instance, lists no less than 50 different ways on how to do so!  Worth a read.

 

Reason # 4: Social media provides businesses with the opportunity to connect with their existing and potential customers

Social mediums are brilliant for connecting with customers and clients – existing and potential. This is particularly great for one reason: to build and maintain an excellent reputation.

Word-of-mouth is one of the best ways of marketing, and good word-of-mouth as well as bad gets around pretty quickly. And it is said that 70% of consumers trust brand recommendations from friends. The process has been accelerated by the advent and usage of social media.

So what exactly is the takeaway here?

It’s simple: businesses should allocate time and resources into building relationships with their customers. This can be something as simple as replying to a tweet or a Facebook comment, to posting a social media success story, sharing something interesting off the internet that might be of value to your users, sharing a picture of the office (or a behind-the-scenes shot), or something else that allows you to connect with your fans.

Because that’s the beauty of social media, it provides you direct access to your fans and clients.

 

Reason # 5: Social media allows you to keep customers up to date

Quite self-explanatory. Keeping your customers informed about quite literally anything at all is as simple as sending out a quick update.

But here are a couple of examples that I recently came across:

Website down? Send out an update to let your customers know that you’re working overtime in resolving all issues.

Need to inform people about a contest, or coupons for your products? Send out an update.

 

Reason # 6: Its free!

So start building a strong presence for your brand and business on the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter and co. All it takes is building a profile and setting things up properly for the first time. You’ll then need to market your page on your website, and manage your updates (which can be easily done via HootSuite, or any other social media management tool).

Read up on our article in order to determine which social mediums would be the best fit for your business – start marketing your products and services, generate traffic and leads and harness the true power of social media!