7.3: Why Is Social Media Important to a Business?

Using social media is an essential component of any business marketing strategy. By providing access to customers’ feedback and interactions, social media platforms help businesses stay in tune with customers, increase brand awareness, and boost their potential leads. Customers can use social media channels to ask questions about products and services. By listening to customer feedback and analyzing the data provided by social media, companies can improve their customer service and increase revenue.

There are several popular social media platforms, and it is expected that more will be developed in the future. You may be active on one or more social media platforms. You might also engage with a business or organization through these platforms, whether by simply following a company’s social media page, by liking and/or interacting with posts from the company, or by sharing information from the company on your personal page. These are all ways that businesses want their target audience to interact. The more interaction with the target group, the more brand recognition and loyalty can be built, contributing to an increase in business for the company.

Not all social media apps are created equal. Some platforms are better suited for sharing photos, while others are better for networking with potential employers. For example, Facebook and SnapChat are more visual, whereas X (Twitter) and LinkedIn are more text based. Each, however, can play a role in your company’s overall strategy. Figure 8.30 lists a few of the major social media platforms and their uses. More research will be needed by your organization if they choose to use one of the platforms.

Figure 8.30: You should consider your target audience when selecting the appropriate social media platform.

A social media plan can be part of a business growth strategy, which should include a planned-out content calendar, an arsenal of automation tools to schedule posts across platforms, tools for tracking performance metrics, and more. Each post a company shares should be designed in advance to maximize the company’s success on social media. Using the tools and strategies discussed previously, a robust social media marketing plan that fits into the overall strategic goals of the company can be enormously beneficial to a business.

But as with any content management, integrating social media into your business plan can be challenging and requires proper planning. The popular phrase “build it and they will come” is true only when strategies are in place. You might get initial visits to your online content, but if the content is not engaging and meeting customer needs, the visitors probably will not return. Therefore, before you implement the different strategies described here, you should think about the key factor that will keep visitors returning: great content and customer service. To ensure content is fresh and trending, listen to what your audience wants and needs. To drive traffic to your site, you need to know your customers—their demographics, their habits, their likes/dislikes. You should also be sure to have a presence on the social media sites where your target audience spends time.

Growing an audience can be a difficult task for a new business starting with zero customers. This will be particularly important for Happy Tails WC managers to ensure as they are a new nonprofit. They will need to build awareness so that they can secure the volunteers and donations needed to run the organization. They will also need to market to get the pets adopted promptly. Understanding who your target audience is will help you generate a better return on investment (ROI). Your target audience is the group of people who would be most interested in your product or service. For Happy Tails, the target market can be large. They are looking for individuals with a passion for animals. But they also need individuals who are good at fundraising and are skilled in event planning. Members of this target audience will have a number of things in common, and you can use this information to create content that resonates with them. Once you build a connection, it will be easier to turn them into loyal customers.

One way to understand your business’s target audience is to figure out what kinds of things they like, and make connections across those things. One way to do this is to partner with other businesses to tap into a wider audience and spread your brand to other markets. For example, in 2013, Pottery Barn, a furniture company, and Sherwin-Williams, a paint company, partnered to allow customers to select paint colors that would coordinate well with furniture. This led customers to want to purchase Sherwin-Williams paint colors because they were custom-selected to match perfectly with Pottery Barn furniture. Pottery Barn developed a landing page that contained blog posts on ideas and tips for how to paint and decorate.

Another common strategy is to allow users to find and tag relevant information with hashtags. A hashtag is a keyword tag that starts with “#” and can be used on a wide variety of social media sites. For example, you may have seen the hashtag #ootd which stands for “outfit of the day.” Happy Tails WC could use hashtags to promote their page such as #potw (pet of the week) or #adoptnotshop to promote the idea of adopting a pet rather than going through a pet store. Hashtags are searchable by users. As a business, you can use hashtags to promote your brand or cause. You can look at competitors’ hashtags and use similar ones for your posts. Hashtags can be part of a broader social media campaign to drive traffic to your page and create content for posts to be shared.

Many social media platforms also enable users to promote their posts to specific demographics or geographic locations for a fee. This goes back to really understanding your target audience. Because of the data collected via social media on individual users, there is a good deal of data available to help push posts to specific audiences. In some instances, you can even promote specific posts based on purchasing habits or websites visited. For example, Happy Tails WC can develop a post and pay to have the post promoted to individuals in the communities around the adoption agency or to those who already have pets based on their social media profiles. Each platform will have its own fee structure for promoting posts. For example, with Facebook, you set your budget. You put in how much you are able to spend for promoting a post or an event and Facebook will use that amount to promote the post. The minimum is $1 per day, which could reach up to almost 80 people based on your target audience and location. With $20 per day, that figure could rise to over 1,000 people. It is beyond the scope of this text to go into detail about promoting posts on various social media sites, but you should be aware that this option exists. By searching the “Help” function for an individual social media platform, you should be able to find specific information on paying for promoting posts.

A backlink, also referred to as an inbound or incoming link, is a hyperlink in a web page that takes you to another website or another location on your site. Google’s ranking process will rank websites that have backlinks higher than those that do not. When your site includes hyperlinks to other websites, it is viewed as more trustworthy. This is similar to writing a research paper for a class. You will probably be required to cite previous research in your paper to support your ideas and conclusions. Web pages work the same way. Backing up your information with sources (i.e., other websites) can increase your credibility. To be effective, the backlink should be a trusted website itself and relevant to your website.

As a final consideration, you may want to think more deeply about the keywords you choose. In your initial search for a website, you may use very general terms. For example, if you are interested in adopting a pet, you might start with a search for the term “pet adoption.” But after further investigation, you may determine that you really want to adopt a certain breed of pet, of a certain sex and a certain age. Your search terms then become more detailed, such as “an adult female dachshund.” This is the concept of a long-tail keyword—a more descriptive set of keywords that are specific to your business. Long-tail keywords are often used by individuals who are closer to actually making a purchase or who want a more in-depth interaction with the company. For Happy Tails WC, this might be the point at which an individual submits an application for a specific pet or reaches out to discuss some options with the organization’s personnel. You may not generate as many visits to the page with long-tail keywords, but the visits that are made will be higher quality and more likely to generate customers.

Attributions

The final material was remixed, curated, edited, authored, and arranged through human creativity, originality, and subject expertise of Gabrielle Brixey, MBA MAC and is therefore under the CC BY NC SA license when applicable.