Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp going down on Monday showed the world how much of our attention we give to social media. Many people resorted to using alternative platforms to get their social media fix, such as Twitter which experienced a large insurge of activity from both regular users and social media marketers.
Big brands such as McDonalds, Netflix, Starbucks and even Twitter themselves all weighed in on Twitter to make jokes at the expense of Instagram, which became a social media highlight for many who retweeted and shared the hilarious posts with others. This just shows the power social media has to bring people together and leave a long lasting impression of your company that they'll remember and talk about for weeks.
For this reason, its best to understand the impact social media marketing can have on our consumers and your company. In this blog post, we explain that effect in more detail and why you should do social media marketing in 2021.
Social media marketing offers a new level of personalisation that wasn't previously possible, allowing companies to express a personality outside of opening hours and develop a very unique relationship with individual customers. Each interaction with a customer can be personalised to reflect their interests and previous interactions, thereby making your interactions more relevant and personalised to that particular consumer.
If you're able to make social media posts that invoke strong emotions in your social media followers, you will quickly become one of their favourite brands. Companies are able to create a community based around their brand by encouraging interaction between customers which in turn promotes solidarity between like-minded people that are unified around your brand. If you make people feel like a part of your journey as a company, they'll want to see you do well - you may even get referrals and you're far more likely to get recommended to friends and family. These kind of customers are vital in business, as not only will they bring you more customers but they are likely to be repeat customers.
When people see your social media presence, there is something for them to base their opinion on. They can see you interacting with both potential customer and previous customers along with work, projects and products you've completed or sold. This gives your business a clear track record and background and positions you as a company that has nothing to hide and confident in their ability to deliver results since you've laid all your cards on the table for everyone to see. This builds a level of trust and can clear any doubts that a potential customer might have when deciding to use your product/service for the first time.
A large portion of consumers on social media make purchases from referrals by other users, which is highly effective since people are more likely to buy a product recommended by someone else as opposed to something they've found by themselves because the person recommending the product/service is going out of their way to tell others about this simply because they've been extremely satisfied with the results. This is a powerful mechanism of social media marketing because posts are often open for the public to see and will not be exclusive to one person, which means hundreds of people could witness an individual recommending your product - thats hundreds of referrals with no action required from you!
If you have a great product or service, you can leverage social media and use contests for your followers which will require them to share a post or your page to win, which in turn gets you more exposure.
When you launch a new product or service, you want to know what people think, what they like about it and what they don't. Whilst it is not uncommon to receive complaints from people who have not even used the service/product, social media is the most efficient and low cost ways of initiating an interaction with your customers and gauging their satisfaction.
You can create polls which are easy to respond to, post a survey and tempt those that complete it with a prize draw or simply ask your followers to tell them your favourite thing about your service/product.
Customer feedback is great since it allows you to focus more on what your customers like and do more of it, rather than focusing on other aspects of your service/product that people are less likely to buy - saving you time and money in the process.
To summarize, social media is a great tool not only for connecting like-minded individuals, but also for connecting people with products and services they'd enjoy. It provides context to an interaction between consumer and business that makes the interaction more personalized to the individual, in a way that traditional marketing could not. It comes as no surprise that 90.8% of businesses in the UK with over 1000 employees use social media marketing and similarly, 81.7% of businesses with 50 to 250 employees.
If you want your customer to feel like a part of a community based around your company and brand, social media marketing will do that for you - so don't hesitate to start your social media marketing campaign today!
