5 Effective Uses of Social Media To Promote Your Business
Every business owner knows that promoting your brand is essential and requires a substantial amount of effort put into it. Promoting and marketing your business requires both creativity and strategy. And, this is where the uses of social media gain prominence.
More importantly, it requires a platform that can reach a large volume of the target audience and improve your brand visibility. This is where the uses of social media come into play. Social media sites are a great platform for all types of businesses to advertise their brand and increase conversions. Social media platforms have a global reach and can easily be used to target a certain group of customers. This makes the marketing process easier, faster, and more efficient for businesses.
Recently, social media marketing has become an up-and-coming field. It is highly popular among all companies and a lot of funds and efforts are devoted towards building a strong social media presence for the brand. In fact, most small businesses depend entirely on social media to promote their brand, instead of using traditional marketing methods.
This proves how important it is to understand the uses of social media and social media marketing in promoting your brand. Therefore, understanding social marketing and digital media marketing is extremely important for business owners.
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Here are 6 effective uses of social media to promote your business and increase your brand visibility that all business owners must know:
1. Reaching out to customers
Social media sites are well known for their wide reach all across the globe and their communication tools. The Internet has now become an essential part of our daily lives, and as of January 2021, there were 4.66 billion active internet users in the world. Moreover, it is estimated that by the year 2023, there will be around 3.5 billion active social media users in the world.
This can be highly beneficial for businesses to reach a large volume of customers for their brand. It can also help you determine your target audience and focus on a specific demographic to increase conversion. With a great social media marketing plan, social media is a great way to start a conversation around your brand.
This will build recognition for your business and can easily give a kickstart to your business. Reaching out to customers and creating conversations around your brand is one of the many uses of social media.
Blogging sites like WordPress or Blogger are great platforms to share the vision of the company and increase relevance. Social networking sites like Facebook and Instagram are great for small businesses and content creators to showcase their products and services and generate more leads. Therefore, communicating your company’s vision to customers and gaining exposure are some great uses of social media sites.
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2. Collaborating with others
The ‘social’ in social media would imply that these tools allow various forms of interactions between users. This doesn’t just include communicating and reaching out. It also involves collaboration. A social media campaign collaboration is a great way to reach a specialized audience fast and is one of the best uses of social media. Collaborating with influencers and other brands can drastically improve your visibility and increase conversions for your business.
The main concept is based on a bartering system. The concept of bartering involves the trade of products or services without the exchange of money. Your content and product can be traded to another company or content producer, which would allow both of you access to each other’s audience.
Saying that, it is also important to maintain the integrity of your brand. Collaborations are usually short-term agreements and are very common on social media, especially among small businesses and influencers. It is important to note that the collaborative brands shouldn’t be your competitors as they could harm you in the long run. But, as a brand or a business, a properly planned collaboration can be highly beneficial.
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3. Gathering Reviews and opinions
Reviews and opinions about your products or services are essential to gain the trust of your audience. Nowadays, everyone does thorough research before they decide to spend their money on something. People want to be assured that the products they are using are of the best quality and deserve their attention.
As business owners, it is important to maintain a great review of your brand to gain the trust of the masses. Also, the review makes sure that the products put out in the market by your business are up to the mark and of high quality.
These reviews and opinions can also be used by businesses to improve upon their flaws. Sometimes the problems in their services or products are very subtle and hard to find. But analyzing customer reviews can give you a great insight into your shortcomings and give you points to improve upon.
Reviews and opinions are great for getting constructive criticism and improving the quality of your services. Therefore, business owners should definitely make the effort to understand and analyze the reviews provided by customers to gain insight into their progress.
4. Brand monitoring
Brand monitoring involves keeping a track of your brand on different social media channels to gain insight into how your business is perceived by the public and perform effective market research. It is somewhat similar to gathering reviews, except here, you don’t depend on people writing a review about your product.
Instead, you keep track of all the social media channels, where your business is mentioned and analyze how your business is perceived by the public. Brand monitoring tools aren’t very popular among the masses but are highly recommended for businesses.
Since we have been discussing market research a lot, let’s understand why it is important for you as a business owner. Understanding the market is a vital step for businesses. Market research can provide great insight into the customer needs and can help you modify your product accordingly. It can identify gaps in customer expectations regarding your product and help you improve on them. Therefore, it is important to focus your marketing strategy on brand monitoring and thorough market research.
5. Media sharing
A lot of social media sites are specifically focused on some of the other forms of media sharing. Platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Spotify, Tumblr, etc. allow people to share their content among the masses and gain more audience. Most of them center around one kind of media.
For example, YouTube is a video streaming platform with over 500 million followers. Instagram is specifically focused on the sharing of visual content like images, illustrations, and infographics. Spotify’s platform is designed exclusively for sharing audio content like music and podcasts.
Media sharing helps you create channels for people interested in services that you provide based on their interests. They are also a great resource to tell your brand’s story and vision. Businesses that put effort into the media they share can easily engage their audience and increase their conversions.
Therefore, it is always wise to make sure that you concentrate a certain portion of your marketing strategy on generating and circulating media content relevant to your business. It is also advisable to create a social media calendar so that you can keep track of your media sharing activities.
6. Keeping up with the trends
Social media trends keep changing every day and can give great insights into consumer behaviors. They are also a great way to capture the attention of the audience based on the currently ongoing event. Keeping up with the trends is especially important for moment marketing.
Moment marketing is a strategy used by many businesses. It takes advantage of the current ongoing events and creates communication about their brands around said events. It helps brands to build their recognition by inserting themselves in a popular conversation going on among the audience.
For effective moment marketing, you need to be on your toes at all times and keep up with the most recent trends and events before they get old. This is where social media comes into use. Social media sites are where all the trends are made. Keeping a constant watch on the next ‘viral’ thing is the only way you can do effective moment marketing, and social media is the best tool for that. This is possibly one of the best uses of social media tools.
There are many kinds of social media sites. Most people are only aware of the most popular ones like Facebook or Instagram, but many other sites focus on a more specific demographic, which should be considered before planning out your marketing strategy.
Given below are the 8 different types of social media sites which will help you understand the uses of these social media sites in various marketing techniques.
Social Networks
Social networks are the most popular social media sites used by a vast majority of people. As individuals, these sites help us connect with our family and friends, meet new people with similar interests and obtain contacts for professional work. The essence of these sites is to bring a personal touch to our process of sharing knowledge.
They also allow media sharing, discussions, one-on-one talks, etc. But they are especially important for businesses. Social networking sites can help you in all the above points mentioned. They are a great tool to place advertisements and reach your target audience.
They can also be used for networking and contacting customers or other brands directly. Social networks can also be used for market research and keep track of recent trends. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are popular social networking sites.
Image Sharing networks
Image sharing networks allow sharing of visual content like images, art, infographics, and illustrations. It is well known that visually compelling content is a great way to drive your point home and gain more recognition among the audience. Image sharing networks are especially helpful for artists to gain recognition for their work.
Businesses also highly depend on these networks to share visual content of their products or services. For individuals, image-sharing networks are a great way to share their galleries and ideas, as well as get inspiration for their work. Image sharing networks have become highly popular nowadays and are a great use of social media. Some of the popular image-sharing networks are Instagram, Snapchat, Deviant Art, etc.
Discussion Forums
Discussion forums, unlike social networks, do not shy away from heated discussions. Their main purpose is to spark a conversation among people and share opinions and ideas openly in a discussion. They are specially designed to involve as many people as possible. Discussions are open for all to join to ask questions and reply to others.
For businesses, these discussion forums are a great platform to research keywords and solutions based on people’s questions as well as gain recognition by directing people to their business. Some of the most popular discussion forums include Quora and Reddit. They are also great for individuals to find the recent discussion happening in their area of interest as one of the uses of social media.
Reviewing networks
Reviewing networks are especially important for businesses to flourish and gain the trust of their customers. These are sites that allow people to review the services and products they received from a company or brand. For individuals, they allow them to understand the available services and chose the best ones. But for businesses, these reviewing sites are highly important as one of the uses of social media.
A company or product with good reviews will bring more customers and conversions. It also makes sure that these companies provide quality services and products depending on the opinion of their customers. Reviews also give good points for the company to improve upon. Some of the most famous reviewing sites are TripAdvisor, Trustpilot, Goodreads, Yelp, etc.
Community blogging networks
Getting a self-hosted website is hard work and requires a lot of effort. Not everyone is into that, especially if their purpose of blogging is just to express their ideas. Community blogging networks are a great resource for people who love to write but do not want to be bothered with the hassle of starting a website.
These networks are one of the uses of social media. They can help you build your voice in a community and drive your point home through the written word. This does not mean that community blogging sites aren’t a great resource for brands and businesses too.
Community blogging networks can be used to re-purpose and share the content on your website and drive traffic towards that. Some examples of community blogging networks are Medium and my personal favorite, Tumblr.
Video Hosting networks
Similar to image sharing sites, Video hosting sites allow you to upload and share video content on the platform to reach the audience. Videos are easily the most popular medium of communication nowadays and have made information more accessible than ever to the masses. Streaming platforms like YouTube and Vimeo are great for content creators to build their audience and gain more customers for their services and products.
It is also one of the best uses of social media for the exchange of information and ideas. Generating a great audience on these video hosting networks can help your business tremendously. They increase the relevance of your product and services and help you engage a larger audience to gain more customers.
Social shopping networks
Unlike commercial shopping sites like Amazon or Flipkart, social shopping networks allow everyone to sell or re-sell their products. These networks are one of the uses of social media. They are a great resource for artists and small businesses to sell their products without having to mass manufacture their products.
They can also be used to understand the latest trends in the market and do thorough market research. Social shopping networks like Etsy and eBay are very popular among artists and small-scale businesses to get more customers with significantly less effort.
‘Sharing’ economy networks
Sharing economy networks depend on a bartering system and allow people to share their resources like homes, cars, etc- within the community. Airbnb is a great example of this and is one of the best uses of social media to get cheap places to stay while traveling.
Anonymous social networks
While these social networking sites exist, they aren’t very useful for businesses to use. Anonymous social networks aren’t popular among the masses and are highly susceptible to incidences of cyberbullying. Therefore, they aren’t one of the best uses of social media, and you’re better off if you stay away from them.
The biggest problem with these types of networks is that, while they allow people to vent, do fail at making them accountable for their actions. Businesses rarely use these sites to promote their services and products as they cannot be used properly wither for market research or to generate more leads.
Understanding how to use social media tools effectively is essential for brands and businesses to promote their business and generate more leads. It is highly recommended to create a social media calendar for all your activities and keep track of the progress that you’ve made. There are many uses of social media for everyone, but for business owners, it is a gift from heaven. Most social media tools are completely free and allow you to perform extensive market research that can help you bring out your A-game.
