The use of social media has become a social trend in the world at present. Almost 7 billion people, according to Wikipedia, are current users of social media networks, probably bigger than any country’s population in the world. Social media makes for constant and universal communication through chats, sharing photos, videos, ideas and lots more. Businesses seize this opportunity for much more purposes, the most important being maximization of profits. Clearly, the chances of a business blooming through the use of social media is relatively high. Organizations like the ‘dwp‘ (Department of works and pensions) which put social media restrictions on their workers would suffer it on the long run.
There are many ways in which these social media networks enhance businesses:
1. MAKING YOUR BUSINESS KNOWN
Signing up for about a dozen social accounts, you can get people to know more about your business. Even, people you couldn’t probably reach due to the locality. Through the share button on most of these social networks, customers can as well recommend your business to most of their trusted friend and this way your business community grows gradually and expands into an online community where there is constant engagement with you and your customers through campaigns, and one-on-one interactions as well.
2. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
Every day, millions of people around the world prefer to use search engine directories to find solutions to their problems even though they could still ask their friends which is a lot stressful. With your businesses registered to many social network accounts, forums and blogs, you’d be sure to get an increase in traffic in your website since your result page always pops up anytime something in your niche is always searched for on the directories. This means more customers will get to know about your business.
3. COST AND TIME, EFFECTIVE
With the advent of Social networks, advertising has become a lot less costly and time consuming. Signing up for a Facebook or Twitter account does not take up to 10 minutes and so does advertising with your Facebook page. Traditional advertising, on the other hand, takes a lot of money and reaches limited number of people. Not to mention, it’s way much time consuming.
4. CONSTRUCTIVE FEED-BACKS
Social media makes it easier to get constructive feed-backs unlike the traditional method where people are supposed to call the customer care services which is very tedious due to bad timing or technical problems. Using the social media, it becomes much easier to lay complaints, queries and positive and negative reviews about the business in a matter of time.
5. TRUST AND LOYALTY
You can gain the trust and loyalty in various ways through the use of the social Medias. Answering or reviewing their comments on social blogs from time to time shows that the business really cares for the needs of their customers and it thus makes the bond strong between entrepreneur and customer. Also, incentives is another way to boost the loyalty of your subscribers. Probably, on a weekly basis, you can arrange for a free product of your business to be given for those who refer the most visitors to your official website. In this way, you gain as well by increasing your traffic and as well gaining the trust of your ‘people’.