It's challenging to locate a brand that isn't involved in social media in some capacity. Given how much social media can accomplish for your brand in the short and long terms, widespread adoption makes sense.
Having a social media presence can be advantageous for businesses in the retail, food, entertainment, and real estate industries, to name a few. The beauty of social media is that it can be used for a variety of things, which is why brands are utilizing it to help their lead generation and commercial objectives.
Here are 11 social media management advantages that contemporary businesses sometimes overlook.
1. Uncover industry trends in real-time
A wealth of business intelligence may be found on social media. Take into account how transparent it is. Real-time, unfiltered discussions between customers and brands are visible to us. It's easy to find information regarding a brand's strengths or areas for client dissatisfaction.
You may learn about industry trends by monitoring the social media activity and shared material of your target audience. For instance, hashtags on Instagram, like #summerootd, can highlight everything from relevant influencers and content producers to current fashion trends.
Social listening can also be used to monitor social chats for certain trends.
You may focus in on what customers are saying about your brand, for instance, using the trend reporting feature of Sprout. You may monitor hashtags and important terms related to your company, but these mentions and hashtags are more than just online chitchat.
Social media dialogues, for instance, can expose everything, from customer preferences to areas where your business is lacking. Based on following feedback, a flurry of compliments or consumer complaints may motivate you to take action. Brands may then create products and real-time solutions that will excite their target market.
2. Comprehensive competitive analysis
The opportunity to research your competition is perhaps one of the most beneficial social media company features. To better understand your competition, employ competitor analysis tools.
What are they presently advertising? What kinds of advertisements are being run? How are you unique from them in your content strategy?
You can find opportunities to experiment with your own content or advertising by conducting a social competitive analysis.
For instance, perhaps you've noticed that while your competitors are dominating Facebook Ads, their Instagram presence is missing. To differentiate yourself from the competition, you might consider user-generated content campaigns or influencer marketing.
With Sprout's tools, you can easily examine the social performance of your competitors. You can keep an eye on growth and engagement to make sure you aren't falling behind with the help of our competition and sentiment analysis reports.
You can also learn which of your own content items is receiving the most engagement through this analysis. Knowing how to cut through the noise in your industry requires an awareness of your top-performing content.
3. Provide better customer service
Utilizing social media allows you to offer prompt, effective customer service, whether it's responding to specific concerns or hearing client feedback. According to the Sprout Social IndexTM, 53% of brands claim that providing good customer service supports their company's social media strategy.
Social customer service is rapid and direct in comparison to phone conversations or emails. However, it still enables businesses to engage in meaningful, forward-looking dialogue with consumers.
Prospects, clients, and competitor businesses may all see how you communicate with your audience online. Positive interactions should always be prioritized by businesses.
An excellent channel for gathering client feedback is social media. Responding to queries and complaints demonstrates your commitment to helping your audience.
But how can you tell if your efforts are actually having an effect on your clients? You can use Sprout to assess the effectiveness and quality of your social customer service. To track the health of your business based on favorable or unfavorable social mentions, sentiment tracking is a feature of our suite of social listening solutions. An increase in complaints or inquiries may be an indication of more serious issues with your customer success approach. On the other hand, a surge of positive sentiment might be a sign that your brand is living up to or surpassing expectations.
The second social media benefit for businesses is producing customer content, which is another way to gain insight into what your audience enjoys seeing.
4. Curate customer content and stories in a snap
Another fantastic advantage of using social media for company is the ability to swiftly share client content and stories. Customer testimonials and success stories correlate with greater engagement and conversion rates.
For instance, keeping an eye on your mentions and tags can reveal satisfying client experiences that you can share with the rest of your followers. To employ in their marketing activities, many companies and stores even collect consumer images.
This is why it's important to have a branded hashtag. You can find shareable posts that your followers will appreciate and build relationships with your consumers by encouraging them to tag their content.
For instance, the clothing line Pretty Little Thing is well recognized for supporting user-generated material and offers users an unique hashtag. Customers are urged to share photos of their costumes on social media and tag Pretty Little Thing in order to be featured on the brand's page and/or Instagram Story.
Customer testimonials serve as social proof in the form of credibility for your company while also demonstrating that you have happy clients.
5. Positioning power for your brand
Simply maintaining an active presence on a social network gives your company placement strength. Consider that your greatest competitor has a successful Instagram account filled with professional images of their product, Stories, and pictures of happy customers.
On the other hand, you have an Instagram profile that is gathering dust. That's not good, is it?
Consistently posting on channels that are relevant to your company communicates that you are busy and seeking for new clients.
When someone searches for your brand on social media, you may also benefit from its positioning power. As opposed to your website, your Facebook or Instagram page can be a customer's initial impression of your business. This emphasizes the value of continuing to be active once more.
6. Build backlinks and a better search engine presence
There has been discussion about the effect of social media on search engine optimization (SEO) for many years.
However, the concept of linkless backlinks, which is relatively new, indicates that social media and search performance are related.
Shares and click-throughs on social media are considered favorable search signals by Google, making social media a significant source of traffic. Tools like Google Analytics can be used to monitor your social media traffic.
Don't ignore using social media as a channel for content delivery. A piece of content that goes viral and receives hundreds of likes and shares can significantly increase referral traffic to your website. Additionally, traffic might be attracted by material that performs well on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). With Sprout's patented ViralPost technology, which guarantees you're using the best send times, you can optimize your social media scheduling.
It would be an understatement to suggest that social media has changed the way traditional advertising is done. All ages of clients can be reached using social media as a platform for advertising. Instagram users are overwhelmingly under 30 years old, according to social media demographics.
Due to their decreasing response to traditional marketing, younger consumers like Gen Z are upending marketing. As they use social media more frequently as they become older, younger customers are setting their own standards for how they should interact online. Beyond overt commercials and advertisements, brands will need to adapt.
Brands should anticipate experimenting with new ad channels as younger customers jump from platform to platform. For instance, a large number of well-known corporations have entered the metaverse and are now holding brand activations to engage with their audience in novel ways.
The prevalence of user-generated content, influencers, and content producers also draws attention to the genuine, experience-focused advertising that appeals to younger consumers, which brings us to our second social media benefit: it humanizes your company.
8. Humanize your brand
Consumers are looking for authenticity in social media content from brands, according to the Sprout Social IndexTM. Nowadays, companies strive to flaunt their personalities. The hyper-professional "suit and tie" attitude has been abandoned by many businesses in favor of interacting personally with customers on social media.
Because social media is all about connection, it gives businesses a special chance to show off their human side, from their staff to their ideals.
Companies can gain from demonstrating their principles through charity and activism since consumers regard company alignment with personal values 74% more now than they did in 2021, according to Index data.
The majority of customers now want to see brands speak out on social and political concerns. Companies that highlight their human side brilliantly include Patagonia.
9. More top-of-funnel leads
Another crucial social media business benefit is the ability to get more top-of-funnel leads. Social media is used daily by billions of users, therefore it's likely that your target audience is already online. By increasing brand recognition, whether through paid advertisements or content marketing, you can attract more top-of-funnel leads.
Having a social media presence is another technique to increase sales by introducing people to what you're selling. Even if these leads don't make purchases right away through social media, increasing awareness might eventually turn them into full-fledged purchasers. They won't buy until they are aware that your brand exists, after all.
10. Stronger talent acquisition
Finding experienced talent is the top difficulty for more than half of marketers this year, but social recruitment can help.
Social media is being used by candidates to network and study potential employers. To keep up with potential career prospects, many hopefuls also follow brands.
Because social networking sites expand your pool of applicants, they help you find talent more effectively. Employee advocacy can increase the candidate appeal of your business.
When current employees talk about your business on social media platforms like LinkedIn, it improves the reputation of your organization. Many applicants utilize social media to examine the company's culture, values, etc. when it posts "we're hiring" information.
Communications professionals are aware of the impact that social media has had on a wide range of businesses. You can use social media to boost your media relations and investor relations strategies. Brands aren't restricted to using traditional media like radio and print newspapers.
Meet them where they are. Journalists use social media sites like Twitter to find sources and potential stories. To establish a relationship, follow and interact with journalists who write for the publications you find interesting. When the chance presents itself, you can then make a pitch to them.
You can enhance company announcements and accomplishments using social media to attract investors along with connecting with journalists and newspapers. Investors utilize social media to research brands, much like job applicants and journalists do.
Disadvantages of social media
In hyping up the advantages of social networking, we could be a little prejudiced. However, it would be negligent of us to omit talking about the drawbacks of managing social media, so here are a few to think about:
Time-Consuming
Social media is frequently criticized for being a pointless waste of time (many of us are guilty of scrolling for hours on end). The advantages of social media management can also take time to manifest.
For instance, comparing social media to more traditional marketing platforms to determine your ROI might be challenging (think: PPC, email marketing, etc).
Utilizing social media for marketing, media, or investor initiatives may take some time, but the wait will be well worth it.
Managing Your Reputation
The capacity to connect and speak with so many people via social media is one of its most attractive features, but if you're not careful, it can also become a problem. To satisfy their customers both online and off, brands must engage in reputation management.
A brand disaster can develop in a matter of seconds from one well-intended post. This is why it's important to understand the foundations of brand reputation management.
What are the biggest benefits of social media for your business?
Brands no longer have the option of going without a social media presence; it has become the norm. And we completely concur that companies shouldn't cling to social media "just because."
Businesses should instead evaluate the potential advantages of social media on their own, based on clear objectives that can be implemented. The economic benefits of having a social presence are undeniable, even though the impact of the aforementioned advantages vary from brand to brand.
Get a free trial of social media for a month to fully grasp its possibilities.
