Social e-Ready

Why Use Social Media?

Businesses want to know why hours spent in online communication is effective in building their business – as opposed to time spent on other marketing activity, developing and delivering product, visiting customers, dealing with staff and managing their business budgets.
Social media activity is not an alternative to any of these things, and never will be. What it provides is far-reaching engagement opportunity, a domain to continually court opinion and provide great customer service, an ability to promote and brand in an “always on” capacity, and active traffic to help your more “static” website presence.

Here are a few reasons why, if you haven’t already, you should be embracing social media:

Portray a voice and personality
Social media enables you to radiate a business persona. It helps to build up contacts who know, like and trust you - people are more likely to buy from people they know, like and trust.

Customer service levels rise
Whether your customers are consumers or business purchasers, they are increasingly savvy. Before making direct contact they are likely to examine the level of service that a company can provide – and they’ll start to look for that in how the brand is portrayed and interacted with on social media.

A better understanding of your customers
Social media will extend your understanding of who is interested in your products and services. Their feedback can also help you to evaluate your current products and services as well as new product development. Your followers can promote your services to their followers acting as a digital Word of Mouth.

It’s a journalist’s tool
Most journalists use social media to find reputable and authentic brands who they can turn to for “voice of authority” opportunities.
Engaging on social media with journalists relevant to your business location and industry will mean you are more likely to be asked for comment and case studies and it will help you to establish authority and credibility.

It helps to distribute your Blog Content, News Letters, Event and other Marketing efforts to a wider audience
Most businesses feel that they should be saying more online in terms of blog posts and news letters etc, and it takes a good deal of time and commitment to produce good content, but there’s no point in writing content which doesn’t then get read and distributed. Social media allows you to broadcast more of what you’re doing and to more people so it’s always promoting your brand.
Many businesses attend exhibitions – social media can be used to extend the campaign, as the social media conversation will begin before and continue after the event as well as act as a digital signpost to your stall while the event is on.
If you curate a Database of Customers and/or potential customers for any reason, including mail shots, we can search through your lists to find and follow them on social media too so that they will see more of your marketing messages.
Social media activity will support your other marketing activity.

Your website traffic will improve
Without question, good interaction on social media has great potential to drive traffic to your website, and so improves SEO. If you’re conversational on social media and linking to your site, Google will end up favouring you and your rankings should naturally improve in turn.
Social Media will help to drop potential customers into your sales funnel with links to the “calls to action” on your website.