Why Does Social Media Matter for Business?

Social media is nothing new, but a lot of people may still be wondering if it’s worth investing in it for their business. When social media first came around, most people thought of it as a tool to connect with people in their personal lives. But social media has grown over the years to become a useful tool for businesses, acting as everything from a recruitment platform to an advertising space and even somewhere to provide customer service. 3.5 billion people around the world use social media, about 45% of the population, and 73% of marketers believe that social media has been either somewhat effective or very effective for their business.

So why does social media matter for your business? There are multiple reasons you should be using it for marketing and to engage with your customers. Keep reading to find out why social media is important for business and how you should be using it.

Why Does Social Media Matter for Business & Ecommerce?

Social media and social media marketing can look pretty time-consuming. When you have a lot of other things to do, you don’t want to waste time on anything that might not be necessary. So perhaps you’re wondering why social media matters and whether you really need it for your business.

The answer is that social media really does matter for any business especially ecommerce stores that wants to keep up with its customers. Your customers are most likely using social media, whether your business is B2C or B2B, and you should be where your customers are. People don’t just use social media to keep in touch with their friends anymore. Many people use it to research brands, to get recommendations for products and services, and to get in touch with companies when they need help. They use social media to leave reviews, make complaints, and more. If you don’t want to miss out on all of this, your business needs to be on social media too.

If your customers being on social media isn’t enough to make you use it, there’s another big reason social media matters for your business. Your competitors are most likely already using social media. So while people could be finding you on social media, they’re instead discovering your competitors. And if your competitors aren’t on social media, you’ll be ahead of the curve if you get there first.

Being on social media can help you to be there for your customers. You can improve customer satisfaction, boost your web traffic and even increase your sales by using social media. Your social media pages are useful for posting links to your content and your products. You can even sell things directly on some social media apps.

Your website is most likely not enough anymore if you want to connect with your customers. Social media can give them a more direct way to contact you and engage with your brand. Your site is enhanced by your social media channels too. Although social media doesn’t directly affect how search engines like Google rank your website, it can help you to get more clicks and links, which will help you to improve your site’s SEO.

How Can Social Media Benefit Your Business?

So there are some of the general answers to the question of why does social media matter for your business. There are also various ways to improve B2B ecommerce sales. But what are the more specific ways that social media can benefit your business and help you to do more? What features does it offer and what different things does it allow you to do?

Get great insights on engagement

The good thing about digital marketing is that it’s often a lot easier to monitor your efforts compared to offline marketing. Whether you’re keeping an eye on your website traffic or seeing how your PPC campaigns are going, you get plenty of cold, hard numbers that can be really useful. The same can be said for social media, which gives you excellent insights and analytics into the activity on your page, profile, and posts, and how people are engaging with your brand.

Each social media platform gives you information on things such as how many people have clicked on your post or visited your page or account, how many people your post has reached, how many followers you have, and more. The important part is that you need to know which metrics are the most important to pay attention to on different platforms. Which ones should you be setting goals for and tracking? Which ones really make a difference when it comes to click-through rate, conversions, and other important data?

Boost your online presence and brand awareness

Building a social media presence for your business is a great way to grow brand awareness and extend your online presence beyond your website. When your brand is more visible in different places, it will be seen by more people and they will start to recognize your brand more. As people share and comment on your posts, as well as mention and tag you in your own posts, your brand name will be spread further and be more recognizable.

Discover advertising options

As well as using social media to get organic results, you can benefit from using paid advertising options, much like with search engines. Different social media platforms have their own advertising options, which offer a range of different ways to advertise your brand. You can have everything from text ads to carousel ads, dynamic creative Facebook ads, video ads, and more. What’s available will depend on the social network and how their advertising platform works.

Advertising on social media platforms can offer a lot of the benefits of paid search advertising. You get great targeting options so that you can easily target your audience based on everything from location and language to age and interests. You also get excellent analytics and data, which makes it easier to track the progress of your campaigns and work out your ROI.

Get more traffic to your site

Social media helps to drive traffic to your site. You can start off by linking to your home page and important pages for services or products that you offer. A content marketing strategy should be part of your digital marketing too, and social media is the perfect place to share a lot of your content. You can link to your blog posts, articles, and other content to promote your site and increase the traffic.

Social media ads are another way to drive traffic to your site, and you can use special landing pages to do so. Combining both organic social media efforts and paid social media advertising means you have traffic coming from two sources on the same platform. And because social media helps to increase brand awareness, it also ensures people keep thinking about your brand and visit your site more often.

Keep your marketing budget low

If you’re looking for low-cost options for your marketing, social media is ideal. Just getting set up on different social media platforms doesn’t cost anything, apart from the time that it takes to do it. Of course, you do have to put time into nurturing your social media profiles, and it will cost you in this way. However, you don’t need to pay to be there. Even when you pay someone to handle your social media marketing for your ecommerce business, it doesn’t need to be too expensive.

Even when you make use of social media advertising, you can get good value for your money. Social media ads have a good ROI and they’re not that expensive to run. They’re also easy to scale, so once you find out what works for you, you can then put some more money into your ad campaign.

The Statistics Show Why Social Media Is Important for Business

If you’re still wondering why social media matters for business, some of the statistics will show you just home important social media is for business.

• In 2020, 44.8% of internet users around the world used social media to find brand information, while 40.4% of people use it for work purposes
• 2 out of 3 of social media users expect brands to advertise in safe, positive spaces
• Ads on Instagram reach 20% of everyone in the world over 13
• 200 million Instagram users visit a business profile at least daily
• 81% of Instagram users research products and services on the app
• The average post engagement on Facebook was 0.11% in 2020
• 66% of Facebook users visit a local business page at least once a week
• 3% of users made a purchase through Facebook in 2020
• Twitter ads reach 8% of people globally
• Ad engagement on Twitter is up 35% year over year
• Cost-per-engagement on Twitter is down 3% year over year
• 70% of viewers bought from a brand after seeing it on YouTube

Social media really matters for any business that wants to be where its customers are. If you want to keep up with competitors and engage with your customers, among other things, you should be using social media. If you are a startup business or need a website redesign consider the WebX360 ecommerce web design packages offered.