Social media affects almost every aspect of our life. Be it our personal space, our interactions with our friends, and family members, engagement with professionals, shopping, investments, tourism, and our day-to-day life – there isn’t a single area where social media hasn’t reached.
There is one more area where social media has started playing a very crucial role. And that is business. Gone are the days when the only mediums to promote business were radio, television, newspapers, hoardings, and pamphlets. This is 2021, and now the ground rules have changed.
We have social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linked In, and many other indigenously developed Indian social media platforms like Chingari, Roposo, and Connected app to promote our business.
There are many ways in which social media affects business. Although we are aware of factors such as how social media makes brands more visible, helps bring more traffic to the website, provides important links, and gives opportunities to collaborate with influencers. However, there are many other ways in which social media helps businesses. Let’s find them.
Promoting content on channels
One of the most effective ways to grow business is by promoting your content on various social media channels where you maintain an account. By creating interesting and innovative content, you create an opportunity for your business to engage with a larger audience. You can use fun facts, and infographics based on your previous achievements to lure potential customers. It’s also important to have a content marketing strategy in place to maximize the benefits.
Make your post viral
every day; millions of new posts are created on social media, but only a few of them become viral. It’s important that more people like and share your content, and expose it to new audiences who will further share it with their friends and followers. As more and more people share your content, the network helps by spreading it further, and eventually, it reaches a lot of users across the internet. This is what we describe as a viral post. It’s not easy to create a viral post, but there is no doubt that only through social media, you can make a post-viral. If you have a large number of contacts, and followers on social channels, it becomes easier for you to create a viral post.
Sourcing content
There are two ways in which you can source your content for social media. You can simply ask your followers what they want or can take help from social listening to get the idea. And once you have this information, you can go ahead and create content. It’s more important to give people what they want because only such content will keep them interested and motivate them to share. Alternatively, you can organize a contest where people can participate and give their ideas in form of posts and hashtags. Such content is known as user-generated content that helps in creating a lot of excitement about your brand that can boost your business.
Managing Goodwill
It’s crucial to have a crisis management plan in place. If you are in business, there would be instances when things suddenly go haywire. In such circumstances, you cannot afford to be silent, because if you choose to do so, it will be counterproductive for your business. One adverse comment about your brand on social media can create a lot of damage to your business. It’s not necessary that only big companies have a crisis management department because even if your operations are not large enough, you can take enough initiatives to avoid things going out of control. The important thing is to listen and engage, and once you do it, it immediately creates an ideal atmosphere to resolve the issues.
Engage with Customers
Social media is an interactive medium where you can directly engage with your customers and audiences. It’s not like the conventional media which is one-way traffic. On the contrary, social media channels operate in real-time where you can immediately answer customers’ multiple queries. Therefore, if you want to be engaged with your audience, you need to initiate the communication. Make it a rule to respond to every query, comment, and doubt that originates from your customer. Your customers should get the feeling that you are concerned with their problems, and would help them. You should regularly monitor social media to know what people say about your brand. It doesn’t matter in which context they mentioned your name. What is more important is that you must respond whenever your name is mentioned on social media. All successful brands follow this rule.
Provide customer support
Your customers expect you to be available and respond to their complaints on social media. In fact, more than 50% of users on social media expect businesses to respond within three hours, and if you aren’t doing that you are likely to lose not only that customer but many more. One dissatisfied customer can do a lot of damage to your reputation by posting an adverse comment about your customer service. If you use the right tools, your customer support on social media can add to your traditional customer care. A good customer service tool can take care of your emails, live chats, and text messages, sparing your energy for more important things.
There is no doubt about the usefulness of social media for business. Hence, it’s not an exaggeration when we say that social media acts as a booster for business.
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