101 Benefits of Social Media Marketing – A New Realm of Opportunities

Social media has become the latest buzzword for online marketers these days, who want to optimize their online existence and give a boost to their bottom line. You too may have heard of several social media benefits but perhaps feel either hesitant to join the league, or need a better understanding of the return on investment (ROI) before you put your time, effort and money for boosting your social presence. Some of you may even think social media marketing as just a passing phase that you have to cash in on before the next “big thing” comes along.

It’s true that the viability of some social media platforms will last as long as people are using them, and they will wander to newer platforms when the popularity of the present platforms dwindle, there’s no debating the fact that you just can’t ignore the benefits of social media for business. Being considered to be the new ways of reaching a huge clientele with lightning fast speed and marketing offerings in cost-effective ways, social media platforms make it important that you leverage the advantages they bring your way.

If you are still hesitant, don’t worry, as a top social media management company, we are here to help. Today, social media marketing is considered as one of the most crucial ingredients of any successful business strategy owing to the benefits of social media. Businesses across the globe are continually striving to discover ways through which social media can lead them to success. From showcasing your company culture and creating brand recognition to reaching your present and potential customers faster, resolving issues quickly, handling a controversy or rumor faster by putting a lid on it – you can do all these and more with social media. If you are still feeling reluctant about whether social media is worth the effort, here is a compilation of 101 key social media benefits that will help you to make an informed choice.

Brand recognition and brand loyalty

1. Attaining effective brand recognition is one of the key benefits of social media marketing. Today, customers want to purchase from a brand they easily recognize. With billions of social media users, you can easily reach out to an audience who may not have heard about you before.
2. Brand loyalty improves to a great extent if you can leverage the tools provided by social media when it comes to engaging your audience. A strategic social media plan can help you in morphing customers into being loyal to your brand.
3. Developing a powerful brand voice is one of the major benefits of social media. You can amplify the overall feel and tone of your brand with the help of enticing social media design, high-value content and a tone that mirrors your business vision and mission. This greatly contributes to providing an enhanced customer experience for the present and potential customers.
4. Enhancement of brand image contributes heavily towards the growth of a business. Once you’ve developed a strong connection with your audience on social media, you can share your story that helps to form an emotional connection with your customers.
5. Brand recognition begins with your social media accounts’ profile and cover image. Have your logo and relevant, clean images featured on your profile and cover images that are not distracting or overwhelming.
6. Social media platforms give you inexpensive yet effective ways to build brand loyalty by giving away items like stickers, sunglasses, fridge magnets, shirts, hats etc, which will create a long-lasting impression on your audience.
7. Improved brand equity is one of the key benefits of social media marketing. But be ready to toil hard for building a strong and extensive social media community would take time and consistent effort.
8. If your high-value brand has a sound presence across major social media platforms, you can rest assured about improved bottom-line. Today’s customers check out a brand’s social media presence before making a buying decision. When it comes to social media presence, forget small as that can turn off prospective customers. Instead, think big and you’ll start seeing the results soon.
9. One of the key social media benefits is that it helps you to showcase your CSR or Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives to a huge audience. By showcasing how your brand caters to the community, you can win hearts of your audience, thus increasing your brand awareness to a great extent.
10. Nowadays, the buying nature of consumers has totally transformed. Many customers buy into the person selling a product or service, not the latter itself. Social media enables you to showcase your commitment to employee development, company’s vision, and mission and share the journey of your company, all of which greatly influence audience engagement and help build your brand value.

Interaction with your audience and consumers

11. Customer insight is something that has to be mentioned when we discuss benefits of social media marketing. Social media platforms generate an enormous amount of data about the consumers in real time. Hence, you get to have an abundance of information about the consumers like who they are, their thoughts about your brand, and what they like, amongst others.
12. One of the obvious benefits of social media management is achieving higher conversion rates. Your brand can become more humanized by interacting with your audience. This is crucial because people by nature, like doing business with other people and not with companies.
13. Every post of yours on social media platforms is an opportunity for you to convert the audience into your customers. There’s most likely to be at least someone who will react to your social shares. Eventually, this reaction can lead to a website visit and finally, a conversion.
14. Regular interaction with the consumers plays a significant role in the growth of any business. Today, most people turn to social media platforms when they want to compliment a product or service. And when they mention your brand, your audience closely follows how you communicate with them. The more people talk about your brand, the more authoritative and valuable your brand becomes to the new users.
15. Social media is a two-way channel that greatly helps to develop a relationship with the consumers. For instance, if you own a real estate company and offer virtual reality, you can communicate with people before, during and after their visits to enrich your relationship with them.
16. Customers these days love to share suggestions and ideas about their favorite brands on social media. Don’t overlook it; pay close attention to it instead. You might come across a valuable idea that could help you develop an effective marketing strategy for your next product release.
17. One of the biggest benefits of social media is that it’s available round the clock. You can leverage it anytime, all the time. It empowers you to respond to consumer issues and queries as soon as they arise, which greatly helps to increase audience engagement and develop trust.
18. To reap the benefits of social media for business, in the long run, focus on building a long-term audience, not one that would wander away after 2-3 visits. Create some value propositions for your brand that will keep your followers and fans hooked for long, if not for a lifetime.
19. As your legion of followers and fans grow, your brand’s reach too will grow. This way, you can go on influencing and enticing more users, which in turn will reflect in your augmented sales. This is surely one of the key benefits of social media.
20. Unlike using general statistics, surveys and questionnaire that are time-consuming and take a lot of effort, social listening can let you know more about your target clientele and engage them better.
21. Don’t keep your conversations with your audience limited to just festivals or special occasions where you simply post greetings for all. Rather, ask open-ended questions, seek feedback and opinion on your offerings and even encourage debates on topics that are relevant to your industry or offerings. The key is to persuade active participation of the audience on a regular basis, not just once in a while or during holidays/special events.
22. Today, social media has become one of the core communication channels just like phone calls, emails etc. Thus, every customer interaction on social media becomes an opportunity to exhibit the level of your customer service publicly. It’s a kind of personal experience that enables customers to believe you care for them.
23. One-to-one interaction with customers is counted amongst the major social media benefits. Though you can always communicate with a group of consumers, one-to-one interactions are what makes them loyal and likely to spend more time with your brand. These loyal customers tend to stay with you longer and even tell about your business to their friends, family, and acquaintances.
24. One of the major benefits of social media for business is to appeal to the emotional facet of humans by sharing beautiful stories – be it your employee celebrating a work anniversary, someone getting a job with your company at the job fair, a fun day when your entire team went to a carnival, or when you decorated the office ahead of the winter holidays. Give your audience a peek into your work culture and they will stay invested to know more.

Marketing and advertising

25. One of the major benefits of social media management, especially for small business owners, is decreased marketing costs. If you can spare as little as one hour each day to develop your social media marketing strategy, you are most likely to start experiencing the results soon. Even paid advertising through social media is relatively cost-effective compared to other marketing channels.
26. With close monitoring of your competitors’ activities on different social media platforms, you can get key insight about them. This is some kind of intel that empowers you to make informed strategic business decisions to stand out of the crowd.
27. Back in a time when social media had not emerged, businesses had to shell out a hefty amount of money for customer acquisition through traditional channels like print, radio, cold calling, billboards etc. With a strategic implementation of useful marketing techniques on your social channels, you can easily lower down such costs to a great extent.
28. Usually, it costs 4 to 10 times more to get a new customer compared to keeping a present one. One of the key benefits of social media for business is that it helps to encourage repeat clients and client retention. By staying active on a regular basis, deepening the relationship with your audience and posting valuable content, you can stay on top of your consumers’ minds, thus making them come back to you when they need your product or service again.
29. New product launch or service introduction is a cumbersome process and involves a hefty amount of money. The emergence of social media has made it easier than ever. You can share a post related to your upcoming product or service launch and all your fans, followers and relationships on social media will get notified and may even show their interest in learning more about the same.
30. You can leverage more from your advertising efforts by merging social media with traditional advertising. Since more than 50% of the society uses social media these days, such merging will make your brand resonate with millions of people.
31. Faster marketing is always effective, especially if you’re planning to launch a new product or service. With traditional marketing channels, it could take several weeks to launch your campaign through print or television commercials. But with social media, you can launch your campaign almost instantaneously across different platforms, thus reaching out to a huge audience.
32. With traditional modes of advertising, you can only offer a salesy approach to your consumers. Today’s consumers don’t like brands to always come up with that approach; they want to be educated first about a brand. With the help of social media, you can build connections with customers, develop relationships, educate them and indirectly sell the product.
33. By monitoring your social media accounts, you can easily find your customers who are most vocal about their positive experiences and engage a few by encouraging them to share their detailed experiences. This will help you to put your customer-friendly face forward for everyone to see and appreciate. You may even ask a few of those whose problems or complaints were resolved satisfactorily to write a few words in your favor. This will show how you are not afraid to give equal importance to both your supporters as well as the naysayers, which in turn will build trust in your brand.
34. With each of your social media profiles, you get one more platform to market your products or services and entice your potential customers into exploring more on offer by either visiting your website or calling you.
35. Once you have got a few satisfied customers, who readily share their positive purchase experiences, you can simply share or retweet such comments and reviews and sit back since these actual customers will now be doing the advertising of your product or service on your behalf.
36. Using social media marketing analytics, you can find your most influential consumers and directly engage them by crafting your marketing plans accordingly. Engaging your loyal customers this way is one of the major benefits of social media marketing.

Audience targeting

37. There was a time when marketers experienced lots of challenges in reaching their target audience with their business-related content. Today, with the help of social media, it has become easier than ever. You just need to share it on the social accounts of your brand and you’re done.
38. As social networking sites hold a wide range of information about the users, their advertising platforms enable you to conduct clear segmentation and in-depth audience targeting. With this, you can stay in front of your targeted audience.
39. Though you may attract a significant number of people to your website through various marketing efforts, the majority of them may simply visit and then navigate away to another site. But instead of having them abandon your site forever, with the help of social media, you can get them back to your website with retargeting, where you can track your visitors and then place customized offers in front of them to make them re-visit your site.
40. Geo-targeting is the way of targeting people who stay or work within a certain distance of your brick and mortar store. A very limited number of advertising channels can pinpoint people within a 20-mile radius of your store location and social media is one of them. With geo-targeting, you can attract more walk-in consumers, build more loyalty and drive more sales at events.
41. One of the key benefits of social media marketing is geo-targeting to send specific messages to your audience based on their demographic and geographical parameters. For example, HootSuite lets you target your Twitter users in particular countries to send them specially crafted messages. You may even create specific messages using your LinkedIn or Facebook company pages and send them to groups in particular countries or locations.

Online reputation

42. Reputation is something that can make or break your business. People keep talking about a brand whether it’s active or not on the platform. With the help of social media monitoring tools, you can easily monitor what’s being said about you. It enables you to respond quickly to customer issues or complaints, thus building trust in your customers.
43. Social media helps businesses to respond quickly to even negative comments and scathing remarks or feedbacks, thus reducing the damaging impact of such negativity while showing the brand in a positive light that’s ready to take responsibility and accept the shortfalls and issues, where they really exist.In case such remarks and comments are found to be baseless and encouraged either by a competitor or someone with malicious intent, your online reputation management team can put a lid on it fast before it snowballs into a big controversy and adversely affects your business.
44. Crisis management is one of the highly effective benefits of social media. Issues can happen at any given moment. If you’ve done something wrong or your offerings are found to have some problems, you can take the help of social media to issue a public statement and respond to the concerns and questions quickly.

Influencers

45. Influencing buying decisions is one of the indirect yet immensely powerful benefits of social media marketing. Social media doesn’t increase the bottom line by itself; great products and services do. However, you can influence your audiences’ buying decisions by establishing trust, usefulness and great branding.
46. Influencer marketing has become a significant part of any successful marketing strategy. Social media empowers you to join hands with influencers such as celebrities, bloggers, journalists etc who’ve thousands of followers. Influencers remain very active on social media and by joining hands with them, you can build relationships, add value and finally, leverage their audience to take your social presence to the next level.
47. Building your professional network and gaining useful contacts is made easy by social networking platforms. You can sort based on your industry, skill set, location etc to find people with whom you would like to connect. You may even join forum discussions or groups to find influencers and eventually connect to them.
48. With quality social media posts, you will get more opportunities to be noted by industry influencers. Some of them may write about your business, thus offering your brand a substantial exposure.
49. Some influencers may even provide you a backlink, which will help improve your search engine rankings indirectly. This is surely one of the major benefits of social media for business.

Website traffic, leads and conversion rates

50. Website traffic is the lifeline of any online business. The more website traffic you have, the better your chances are for increased sales. A strong presence on social media coupled with implementation of some useful social media tips greatly helps you to attract relevant traffic to your site.
51. Some studies have found that as compared to outbound marketing, social media has a 100% higher rate of converting leads to sales.
52. If driving website traffic is your main goal, you can accomplish it with the help of social media. Adding social media widgets to your site can greatly improve its performance. You just to need to incorporate social sharing buttons, links to the social media platforms, or embed your whole social media feed to your site to let people know what is going on.
53. Word of mouth plays a critical role in the growth of a business’s conversion rate. Once you’ve developed a solid pool of engaged customers, you can rest assured of the fact that some of them will refer your product to their family and friends.
54. Social media attribution is one of the key social media benefits that help you to move interested purchasers down the sales funnel and closer to purchasing your product. Nowadays, customers want to interact with a brand in different ways before making a buying decision. They watch your YouTube videos, visit your Facebook page etc to make an informed decision.
55. Email marketing is always an effective way to attract new leads. If you can strategically merge useful email marketing techniques with social media marketing, you’re more likely to attract new prospects and nurture them until they convert.
56. Co-marketing opportunity is one of the biggest benefits of social media marketing. Here, you can partner up with other brands in your niche and create co-marketing initiatives and campaigns. Both of you receive exposure to each other’s audience, thus boosting your audience reach.
57. As a marketer, your primary goal is most likely to get the attention of your target audience. This is one of the basic benefits of social media for which you should invest time, effort and sometimes money in social media channels. You’ll be in a better position to obtain customers’ attention this way compared to a television commercial, a newspaper advertisement or a billboard ad campaign.

Content

58. Today, the attention span of people has become quite short and keeping the visitors engaged has become quite difficult. Single format content may not work for you perfectly and your brand can fall behind the competition. Social media platforms such as YouTube, Pinterest etc enable you to leverage different media formats like high-quality images, videos etc to keep your visitors engaged.
59. One of the key social media benefits is educating your target audience. The more you can educate your prospects about your product or service, the more likely they will be to purchase from you. You can use social media to inform and educate them about the benefits of your product or service with the help of product reviews, testimonials, informative blogs, how-to videos etc.
60. Content marketing is used by marketers to educate, acquire and retain consumers. Content marketing involves e-books, blogs, articles, white papers, podcasts etc. You can leverage social media by making it your content distribution network to boost your content marketing efforts.
61. One of the biggest benefits of social media marketing is making your content go viral. Ideally, you should include all your social sharing buttons into each and every piece of your marketing content. If your content is of high-quality, people will automatically share it, thus helping your content reach a huge audience that’s present on social media.
62. It’s crucial to use hashtags for your business campaigns or events. It enables people attending the campaign or event to interact among themselves. Because of social media’s viral nature, your friends and followers or anyone who uses the hashtag will be able to know about the updates related to your campaign or event. This way, you can boost organic awareness of the campaign or event.
63. One of the major benefits of social media for business is that you can gather user-generated impartial reviews and ratings. With these reviews, you can obtain a clear understanding of your brand’s strengths as well as its weaknesses. And you can then use them to modify your marketing strategy accordingly.
64. Social media lets you leverage user-generated content. Be it retweeting a customer’s tweet, using your Instagram feed to show videos and images regrammed from your consumers’ accounts, you can simply use content that your consumers have already posted online to showcase your brand’s consumer-connect.
65. By posting a variety of thought-provoking, well-researched content on social media platforms, you can establish yourself as a thought leader or authority.

Customer service

66. Customer feedback plays an immensely crucial role in the success of a product or service. Social media helps you to gain customer feedback when you’re launching a new product or service. You can conduct surveys and incentivize the fans and followers to participate, and based on the results, you can plan the product or service launch.
67. Employing a pool of customer service staff involves a significant amount of overhead cost. By leveraging social media, you can lower it down to a great extent. But again, you need to make sure that you’re listening to people’s concerns and thoughts about your brand and responding to their issues as soon as you can.
68. If you have different people handling your business social media accounts and customer service, ensuring they have a clear communication line between them would help you to provide faster, more efficient customer service and resolve issues without any chance of miscommunication or doubts.

Competitor research and task automation

69. Social media platforms are completely public. As a result, you can monitor what your competitors are doing, and even pick a few tricks from them that you can use for your business.
70. You can find the people who are visiting your competitors and start following and interacting with some of them. You can slowly introduce them to your company and gradually try to entice them.
71. Availability of various tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, SproutSocial etc can make your social media scheduling and management tasks a lot faster and less tedious. Automating some tasks using such tools is one of the chief benefits of social media management.

Keywords, SEO and search engine ranking

72. When your social media posts or updates are shared a lot and go viral or start trending, they will be picked up by major search engines for being trustworthy and displayed ahead of your competitors’ posts, thus giving you some welcome leverage in the digital world. This way, such posts or updates can have an indirect yet substantial impact on your brand’s SEO.
73. Since an older person is likely to use a search phrase to find your website that’s different from the one a millennial will use, you can use keyword variations for syndicating your content on different social media platforms to organically reach a wide variety of potential consumers.
74. Improved search engine ranking and better brand exposure by using SEO optimized content across various channels is one of the important benefits of social media management. Be it Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or Pinterest, using relevant keywords and placing them right can help you get indexed by search engines.

Human Resource

75. It’s not just about traffic and sales when you consider benefits of social media for business. You may even tap into various social media platforms (especially LinkedIn) to recruit talented professionals.
76. When recruiting for your company, your HR team can browse through the potential candidates’ social media accounts to get a useful insight into their personality and even notice red flags, if any.
77. Social media can prove to be an effective tool for employee engagement and even help in tracking the same easily and in an efficient way.
78. Since most employees post something or the other about their job or employers, you can leverage this trend and turn them into your brand advocates. With their positive comments and praises, your sales can get a welcome boost.
79. Short-listing professionals who aren’t looking for a job change right now but could be well-suited for your company and may be tapped later on is made easier by social media platforms.
80. Since vacant positions in the company often hit the bottom-line big time, you can even create a pool of talent using various social networking platforms. In your hour of need, you can quickly refer to this pool and get through to the professionals who are the best fit for the job to find if they would be interested in taking up your offer.

Others

81. 81. Drumming up free publicity fast for your contest, events or new launches are made easier by social media platforms. This is one of the major benefits of social media for business.
82. Businesses need to be top of emerging and upcoming market trends. With close monitoring of industry leaders and other influencers on social media, you can spot or predict such trends before they are picked up by the mainstream media.
83. Social selling costs almost 75% less than conventional lead generation techniques, say some reports.
84. By understanding the fundamentals of newsjacking and social signals, you can get your brand some added leverage on the internet.
85. Social media lets you reach real people who are genuinely interested in your offerings. Some platforms and third-party apps let you segregate such potential customers based on their jobs, interests, income, online behaviors and activities etc, which can help you to target them with customized messages and offers.
86. Since you can track how your social media marketing efforts are performing, you can get a clear picture of your ROI and even tweak your techniques, as and when needed, to reach the desired goals.
87. A/B testing is one of the biggest benefits of social media marketing as you can test your images, ad copy etc to get the most out of your social media advertising efforts.
88. You can use social media to build a robust email list. This is just like using social media to drive more traffic to your website. The difference is just that instead of your website’s landing page, you direct the traffic from social media to your email sign-up page.
89. The power of social media lies in bringing some unexpected customers your way through referrals, social media shares, and word-of-mouth publicity, all of which may give you quite a few indirect sales.
90. By integrating your email marketing efforts with your social media channels, you can boost the number of consumer interactions happening through both social media and email.
91. Advanced targeting is among the leading social media benefits where you can you can use different approaches to target different people. For example, you may find those people on LinkedIn on Twitter who follow a competitor of yours or a specific brand similar to yours or use Pinterest to showcase promoted pins and find those who use specific keywords to find them.
92. Result tracking is one of the biggest benefits of social media for business since it helps in measuring leads generated, email subscriptions, sales, website traffic etc, all of which help in evaluating the effectiveness of the social media marketing efforts.
93. With a practical social media marketing approach, businesses can enjoy increased sales, bigger deals, and an enhanced ROI. All these are important benefits of social media marketing.
94. With good content, solid engagement and a strong network of fans and followers, you can encourage more brand mentions on social media, which in turn would improve your organic rankings on the leading search engines.
95. According to some studies, teenagers stay online 27 hours on a weekly basis, while 59% of older adults use Skype and Facebook. With a strong presence on social media platforms, you can reach out to this prospective clientele.
96. Social media lets you highlight your customers’ product reviews and testimonials to connect with potential buyers and help them in their research about which products they should buy.
97. Social media offers useful marketplace insights where you get to know about consumer sentiment and needs, their direct interactions, buying language, brand mentions etc. Most marketers consider this as the key amongst all benefits of social media.
98. Be it spotting the hottest trends on Pinterest, or using advanced Twitter search to keep an eye on how people are interacting with respect to your brand- or business-specific keywords, social media helps you in needs/demand analysis.
99. Social media doesn’t just help in employee recruitment. You can use it even for employee retention. Many brands post about work competitions or employee accomplishments on different social media platforms, which have been found to have a positive effect on employee retention and engagement. If you have plans for employee development (such as workshops to hone skills, special consideration for pursuing certifications and courses for growth prospects etc), you can share them too to reinforce your brand’s employee-friendly image.
100. One of the key benefits of social media marketing is sales optimization. With a user-friendly, appealing site, an awesome brand presence online, and efficient social media marketing, it’s possible to optimize your sales effectively. Even start-ups and small businesses have built great income streams through social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest etc. You too can leverage the major social platforms of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest and LinkedIn to generate ROI on your own just like many others before you have done.

Social media is going to stay here and even get bigger and better in the coming days. There’s no escaping its power and if you choose to neglect it, you will be giving the competition an undue advantage. As people these days prefer to stay socially connected everywhere and for most of the time, and use social media almost every day, businesses and entrepreneurs just can’t afford to lose tapping into the huge potential of social media platforms.

However, some overzealous marketers often make a mess in their enthusiasm of being too salesy and end up irritating or scaring people away with their aggressive advertising campaigns. But with proper strategy and the right implementation, you can organically grow your reach on various social media platforms and boost your business’s visibility.

Now that you know the benefits of social media, paying attention to the present social networks and keeping a close eye on how they transform over the next few years is important. To reap social media benefits, you have to forecast and spot trends and act proactively to make the most of every opportunity that comes your way.  Remember – social media is not going anywhere. The sooner you join the bandwagon and master the tips and tricks, the better placed you will be to take advantage of the benefits of social media for business.

So, what are you waiting for? Take the plunge, contact us today, and start leveraging various social media platforms to find which ones suit your business goals and requirements the best. After all, the benefits of social media for business are just too many to ignore them, right?