20/08/2015

By Jonathan Bird, Managing Director of WarehouseDating.com

As a small business, you really need to take advantage of every opportunity that you can to not only secure repeat business, but also gain new customers. Social media is a very powerful tool that can help you achieve that. Here are 8 reasons why your small business needs a presence on social media.

1. Social Media is a direct link to your customers.

Social media provides an avenue for you to communicate directly to not only your existing customers that follow you on social media, but potential new ones as well. If you establish yourself as a business owner that not only cares, but interacts with their customers, people will like you, and by extension, your company as well.

2. Advertising your Brand.

You can customise your social media profiles to use your logo as a profile picture and your company name. So every tweet or post that you make is advertising for your business, every time that tweet or post is shared, that’s more and more people who will be seeing your brand everywhere. If your post is good enough to go viral, you could see your post being seen by a lot of people.

3. Social Media is FREE.

There isn’t much more to say beyond that really, every post you make, every like, share, retweet, reblog etc that happens is your brand being seen by potential new business. The only thing it costs you is your time.

4. Social Media and Mobile go hand-in-hand.

As you are most undoubtedly aware, mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are fast becoming if they aren’t already a central part of the average person’s everyday life, ESPECIALLY with young people. People use their smartphones to browse the internet, watch videos, listen to music and most importantly, browse social media. With everything so easily accessed anywhere from bathroom breaks to commuting on a small device everyone has, ignoring this will lose you out on a lot of business.

5. Increase your Web Traffic and SEO impact.

The marketing you create using social media, will create increased traffic to your website as a lot of people use social media like Facebook to hunt for local business’ which by itself is increased business. The secondary effect of this and of people sharing your posts, which will result in a lot more links pointing to your site, is that this will also increase your SEO impact, which means that your website will climb up the rankings in googles search algorithm. Becoming the number 1 search result for your search terms will be a drastic boost in web traffic and business.

6. Keep tabs on what people are saying about your business.

Keeping an eye on your social media channels will give you an insight into what your clients are saying about you. Keeping an eye on this would be an invaluable resource of information for you, allowing you to either interact and say why things are how they are, or change things if what the client suggests is a good idea.

Social Media is a fantastic, FREE marketing tool that can not only get your brand out there for everyone to see, but can increase your reputation and help you stand out from the crowd as being a business owner who cares about his/her customers and interacts with them. I would strongly recommend that you take advantage of it like everybody else is before you get left behind!