Top 10 Benefits of Social Media

Here’s a look at just some of the ways Social Media Marketing can improve your business:

1. Increased Brand Recognition

Every opportunity you have to distribute your content and increase your visibility is valuable. Social media networks are simply new channels for your brand’s voice and content. This is important because it simultaneously makes you easier to reach and more accessible for new customers, and makes you more familiar and recognizable to existing customers.

2. Improved brand loyalty

Brands that engage on social media channels enjoy higher loyalty from their customers. Companies should take advantage of the tools social media gives them when it comes to connecting with their audience. A strategic and open social media plan could prove influential in morphing consumers into being brand loyal ~ 53% of Americans who follow brands on social media are more loyal to those brands.

3. More Opportunities to Convert

Every post or update you make on a social media platform is an opportunity for customers to convert. When you build a following, you’ll simultaneously have access to new customers, recent customers, and old customers, and you’ll be able to interact with all of them. Every blog post, image, video, or comment you share is a chance for someone to react, and every reaction could lead to a site visit, and eventually a conversion. Not every interaction with your brand results in a conversion, but every positive interaction increases the likelihood of an eventual conversion.

4. Higher conversion rates

Social media marketing results in higher conversion rates in a few distinct ways. Perhaps the most significant is its humanization element; the fact that brands become more humanized by interacting in social media channels. Social media is a place where brands can act like people do, and this is important because people like doing business with other people; not with companies.

5. Higher Brand Authority

Interacting with your customers regularly is a show of good faith for other customers. When people go to compliment or brag about a product or service, they turn to social media. And when they post your brand name, new audience members will want to follow your updates. The more people that are talking about you on social media, the more valuable and authoritative your brand will seem to new users.

6. Increased Inbound Traffic

Without social media, your inbound traffic is limited to people already familiar with your brand and individuals searching for keywords you currently rank for. Every social media profile you add is another path leading back to your site, and every piece of content you distribute on those profiles is another opportunity for new visitors. The more quality content you post on social media, the more inbound traffic you’ll generate, and more traffic mean more leads and more conversions.

7. Decreased Marketing Costs

If you can lend just one hour a day to developing your content and distribution strategy, you could start seeing the results of your efforts. Even paid advertising through Facebook and Twitter is relatively cheap (depending on your goals, of course). Start small and you’ll never have to worry about going over budget—once you get a better feel for what to expect, you can increase your budget and increase your conversions correspondingly.

8. Better Search Engine Rankings

SEO is the best way to capture relevant traffic from search engines, but the requirements for success are always changing. It’s no longer enough to regularly update your blog or website, ensure optimized title tags and meta descriptions, and distribute links pointing back to your site. Google and other search engines may be calculating their rankings using social media presence as a significant factor, because of the fact that strong brands almost always use social media. As such, being active on social media could act as a “brand signal” to search engines that your brand is legitimate, credible, and trustworthy. That means if you want to rank for a given set of keywords, having a strong social media presence could be almost mandatory.

9. Richer Customer Experiences

Social media, at its core, is a communication channel like email or phone calls. Every customer interaction you have on social media is an opportunity to publicly demonstrate your customer service level and enrich your relationship with your customers. For example, if a customer complains about your product on Twitter, you can immediately address the comment, apologize publicly, and take action to make it right. Or, if a customer compliments you, you can thank them and recommend additional products. It’s a personal experience that lets customers know you care about them.

10. Improved Customer Insights

Social media also gives you an opportunity to gain valuable information about what your customers are interested in and how they behave, via social listening. For example, you can monitor user comments to see what people think of your business directly. You can segment your content syndication lists based on topic and see which types of content generate the most interest—and then produce more of that type of content. You can measure conversions based on different promotions posted on various social media channels and eventually find a perfect combination to generate revenue.

These are the benefits of sustaining a long-term social media campaign, but if you’re still apprehensive about getting started, consider these points:

  • Your Competition Is Already Involved. Your competitors are already involved on social media, which means your potential social media traffic and conversions are being poached. Don’t let your competitors reap all the benefits while you stand idly by. If, somehow, your competition is not involved on social media, there’s even more of a reason to get started—the field is open.
  • The Sooner You Start, the Sooner You Reap the Benefits. Social media is all about relationship building, and it tends to grow exponentially as your followers tell their friends, and their friends tell their friends, and so on. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll be able to start growing that audience.
  • Potential Losses Are Insignificant. Realistically, you don’t have anything to lose by getting involved in social media. The amount of time and money it takes to create your profiles and start posting is usually minimal, compared to other marketing channels. Just six hours a week or a few hundred dollars is all it takes to establish your presence.

Bottom-Line

The longer you wait, the more you have to lose. Social media marketing, when done right, can lead to more customers, more traffic, and more conversions, and it’s here to stay…

Using LinkedIn for Small Business in 10 Easy Steps

LinkedIn is the marketing hub of many social selling executives and solopreneurs. What about small businesses using LinkedIn to reach their goals? 80% of small business owners, with 200 or fewer employees, use social networks to find new customers and grow their revenue, and LinkedIn is one of them, as they report. A recent Wall Street Journal study also indicates that 41% of small businesses feel that LinkedIn provides them the most potential to generate business.

Your LinkedIn for small business goals can range among:

  • Expand and increase your relationship currency with your network with key contacts
  • Build your credibility with content
  • Expand the reach of your story by leveraging your employee base

Today, the LinkedIn profile is the new business card. And, content is the new networking tool. As with all social media platforms, LinkedIn has a social contract with its members, along with key use cases. LinkedIn is not another sales channel or place to promote a coupon. LinkedIn becoming more of an editorial and publishing channel and when used correctly is the foundation for every small business to build credibility with content and an evangelizing workforce.

Step 1: Create a LinkedIn Company Page

With over 3 million company pages, as of late 2013, you need to play to win on LinkedIn or get left behind. In addition to maintaining an All-star personal page, you need a LinkedIn company page to amplify your brand to distributors, association members, customers, and others. A LinkedIn company page also lets you highlight your services, thought leadership, and employees to build your external credibility and community. Best of all, a LinkedIn company page is free if you have a healthy personal profile.

Step 2: Run Your Personal and Small Business Company Page as a PPC or SEO Campaign

If your small business marketing strategy does not include a search engine optimization component, then it should – ensuring you are there when your customers are Googling you. There are over 1 billion annual searches on LinkedIn and 87% of purchases start with a search engine. So, by running your personal and LinkedIn company page and personal profile as a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, you can increase your company’s and content ‘findability.’ Include keywords in your headline, summary, anchored text, job descriptions and endorsements to be found on Google and LinkedIn searches.

Step 3: Find and Participate in a LinkedIn Group With Local Ties

LinkedIn reports the average user joins 7 LinkedIn Groups, so your customers, influencers, and competitors are using this LinkedIn community. Over 70% of customers use groups to research, network, and vet buying decisions. So, join all 50 of your potential LinkedIn groups to be as accessible as possible to other group members. And, regularly participate, in a non-promotional way, in 3-5 groups to network with other business owners, distributors, and press.

Step 4: Begin To Blog On LinkedIn

Technorati reports that 31% of customers are influenced by blog posts. So, it makes sense for every small business to post articles on their blog, their website, and LinkedIn to reach and connect with their audience. It could be the same content on each platform since you will be connecting with different audiences on each site. Blogging is a new content networking tool and will help build your credibility and increase your business’ message’s reach when others share it with their network.

Step 5: Leverage Each Employee Within Your Small Business

Dell reports that only 8% of their owned channel followers overlap with their employees’ followers. Train and leverage your small business employees as brand ambassadors to build your small business brand; telling your company story and accessing their incremental network.

Step 6: Secure LinkedIn Endorsements

Dimensional Research reports that positive endorsements, like those on Yelp and Amazon, influence a purchase decision 88% of the time. LinkedIn endorsements are like Yelp and Amazon reviews for your small business and you and your employees can use these personal endorsements to build your small business’ reputation.

Step 7: Secure LinkedIn Recommendations

86% of US consumers are influenced by recommendations. With over 1 billion annual recommendations, you and your small business need to be a part of this ‘word of mouth’ marketing strategy, since these recommendations are like referrals, you need to get as many as possible to make a difference with customers.

Step 8: Showcase Your Work In Video, Slides, Interviews, and More

Only 22% of B2C companies have secured a lead through LinkedIn, while 53% of B2B businesses have. The real impact LinkedIn has is its ability to share work examples, thought leadership, research, and a POV to help influence the purchase or relationship. For example, an easy and ‘built in’ way to share this type of content is to research and connect with distributors is using SlideShare.

Step 9: Send 6 to 8 Daily Status Updates

LinkedIn is not the place to be posting coupons for your small business. The social contract to which you should subscribe is to use LinkedIn to develop your positioning. Send at least 6 daily messages spread across 6AM to 12AM to increase your company’s exposure to your followers and your 2nd’ and 3rd-level connections (i.e., the followers of your followers and their followers).

Step 10: Shine Up Your LinkedIn Curb Appeal

49.5% of LinkedIn profiles are not completed, which means they will not show up in a LinkedIn search. Just like selling a home, you cannot sell your small business’ credibility and products and services unless you work on its social media curb appeal. Audit and tune up your profile to see immediate and measurable results.


You cannot be using the same Facebook and Twitter content and techniques in this channel, even though it has the same customers. So, if you embrace the channel to distribute your thought leadership to impact your small business, then you will be successful.