Benefits of Social Media

What is Social Media?

Social media is a communication platform that is online rather than conventional and dedicated to build interactions, relationships, content-sharing and collaboration with the community. Social media gives us direct access to many people at once for building relationships, networking, brands-sharing (whether personal or business) online. Presently, many companies have engaged themselves with their customers through Social Media Networks to find out what they want, think or feel at any given time.

Is Social Media Safe?

As yet, some people among us are apprehensive about their details on social media, whether safe or not, available there for anyone to steal. You know that your personal details can be secured on a majority of social media sites, controlled by you but it seems essential to update and change your credentials regularly and sensibly. But some business details like contact numbers and email addresses are likely to be made available on your websites for easy accessibility of your prospective client or customer and to get in touch with you. However, your address if you’re doing from home or other sensitive information must not be shared on a website or social media. It is your own choice to share how much information about yours or your business.

Social Media has a lot of benefits. (Photo by Gerd Altmann)

Using social media platforms has become more prevalent by the companies to interact with their prospects or customers. These social platforms include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+, Webinars, Skype, and Podcasts. There are many benefits of using social media:

§ Social media is absolutely free-of-cost.

§ On Social media, you can get huge audience including prospects and customers.

§ Social media can be utilized as an additional communication tool along with traditional methods.

§ You can engage with your customers easily through social media.

§ Using social media, you can find visible presence and demands of your customers on the web; about what they want, think and feel.

§ You can get real-time feedback from customers through Social media platforms.

§ You can get the people on social media as a community; who are following you or your fans. Once you get the community of followers, put them to work and probe them what they need or want.

§ You can talk and listen to your customers and prospects about your products or service easily through social media.

§ Using social media, you can build large connections with people to reach out to them quickly. For example, someone maybe looks up and see the President of United States but is only two degrees away on LinkedIn.

How can Social Media help Businesses?

Today, social media has entered into marketing as well as in social activities and no one can deny it. Yet I also hear some people saying that they have no time for social media to respond it. In today’s fast-growing and highly competitive marketing environment, you have no time to build relationships with the prospects or customers and promote your marketing activities. It is too difficult, is it? But there are tools and techniques available on social media to help you. You may think that your prospects and customers are not active on social media, so how can social media help businesses.

Do you know that the most increasing demographic on Facebook is women over the age of 55? Similarly, on LinkedIn, the most common and acquainted sector is “service” consisting personal profiles of everybody, who joined, from cheese-makers to the President of United States. On these channels, there are a group of persons, large or small, just waiting for you to put your brands or profiles on their radars.

Current and New Marketing Tools

What do you have in your marketing toolkit? Presently, most companies have some gadgets in their marketing toolkit such as newsletters, website, news media articles, surveys, events, Television and Radio, referrals and old business telephone directory. If some companies having not all of these tools will have a price tag attached to them which is easily accessible to a lot of companies’ reach. You know that every company can’t afford to advertise on TV over the time and these tools can’t be cost effective.

Currently, the social media and online websites are becoming more popular as a commonplace. The good thing is that social media is really a cost-effective source of advertisement, apart from your time. So if you are still twisting on your business directory Ad, as a secure way to generate new inquiries, then it could be time to reconsider your plan and move on to something new. The current and new marketing tools are listed below:

Current Marketing Tools (Already in practice)	New Marketing Tools (Becoming more popular)
Newsletters	LinkedIn
News media	Twitter
Website	Facebook
TV and radio	YouTube
Business Directory	Blog
Referrals	Webinars
Surveys	Forums
Intranet	Podcasts
	Other social sites