Social media is more than big; it’s gargantuan. According to statistics, 3.8 billion people use social media and more than 4.5 billion people use the internet. That’s understandable when there are so many different platforms out there: Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and TikTok being the main ones. It seems that the younger generations are moving away from Facebook and towards platforms like Snapchat, YouTube and Instagram in recent years, whereas older people are moving towards sites like Facebook.

Social media usage

Naturally, networking is the main way to use social media, but it’s not the only way. People are going online not just to interact with their friends, family and work colleagues, but also to share videos, photos and build communities. They’re also playing around with interactive features such as virtual reality/augmented reality filters and musical overlays on Snapchat or TikTok.

It’s not only individuals who are using social media; businesses are also using it. Of course, they’re not using it in quite the same way as individuals are, but rather harnessing the power of the platforms to help them generate sales and are doing so in various ways:

Advertising

Advertising on social media is much cheaper than advertising on traditional media, where it’s somewhat close to hitting and hoping. On social media, you can target the ads at the people you’d like to buy from you. Not only that, you can monitor their performance and adjust the campaigns quickly instead of pouring money into a campaign that’s not working (but which you don’t realise this until much later on).

Campaigns on social media have the option to monitor how that particular campaign is performing so businesses can make a quick decision if the campaign should continue or not.

Building brand awareness

Social media is exceptionally powerful when it comes to building brand awareness. People can’t buy from you if they don’t know you’re out there and social media has made it much easier for brands to get on people’s radar. Businesses have nothing to lose by creating a free social media profile and can be where their customers are. Building authority and an audience and creating conversations… it’s all part of raising brand awareness on social media today.

Driving more traffic to their website

Social media allows you to get your business in front of your audience and generate targeted traffic to your website. You can do it with an ad or with a shared blog post, for instance. This is no ordinary traffic, either, but someone who’s already interested in your business in some way, so you stand a better chance of achieving a conversion. At the very least, you could get a link to your website from another website, which is good news for your SEO. Speaking of SEO….

Increase their online visibility

Digital-savvy businesses know there’s some form of link between social media and visibility in search engines. Although social media profiles don’t necessarily have an impact on a website’s ranking, search engines do consider social signals, to an extent. Social media profiles rank for brand names, giving you a chance to climb towards the top of search engine results pages, with your social media profile providing a gateway to your website.

Keeping your social media profiles up to date and creating fresh content on them builds your presence on the web. Social media platforms are the new search engines, with searchers using keywords and hashtags to find people. Users are sharing content all the time and if you produce something really terrific, potential customers who come across shared content may become interested in your business and check you out on the professional platform LinkedIn.

Social media isn’t the only way to grow sales

As powerful as it is, social media isn’t the only way that businesses can boost their sales. They can also utilise the platforms to collect contact details of prospects. The Lusha Chrome Extension tool is designed to gather direct contact details of prospects from social media platforms. It helps businesses gain contact details they did not originally have. It is a quick process and allows businesses to save these details in their own systems effortlessly. Businesses can also check the validity of email addresses and whether the recipient is likely to respond or the email will just bounce back undelivered. Ultimately, tools like this can save sales teams time and frustration when they’re generating leads and following them up.

Then there’s the benefits of email marketing, which allows businesses to deliver marketing messages and content straight to a prospect’s inbox. It’s a chance to provide them with some value, have a real conversation with prospects and build a relationship with them. Just like social media ads, businesses can track the success (or failure) of their email marketing campaigns, by looking at aspects such as open rate and number of people unsubscribing and then adapt their campaigns.

Companies can utilise social media by using tools that help gather direct contact details of prospects to help maximise time and efforts of salespeople.

Social media is a powerful tool for generating business. Any business that doesn’t make the most of it to get out there in front of their target audience will get left behind. With a good strategy behind you, you can generate business without even spending on advertising, but you need to create good content and be where your audience are to achieve this.