Social media has grown to be an important tool for nearly all businesses over the last decade. And with over 246 million people using social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook in the U.S., these platforms provide an audience reach that shouldn’t be ignored. From the ability to geotarget specific local audiences of small businesses through ads and groups, to the chance to be part of trending conversations among peers within a larger industry, social media platforms have many pro’s for both large and small companies. 

Here’s why social media marketing is essential for brand development in today’s market no matter the size of your business and which advantages of the platforms businesses should focus on.

Building brand awareness

One of the first concepts to master on social media is understanding what it’s all about: connecting with people. It’s unlikely for your brand to be part of the conversation if your target audience doesn’t know anything about you – or even that you exist. Many businesses recognized this and began to put themselves in the conversation by joining these platforms with company pages. Over time, social media has become a way for businesses to weave themselves into popular culture and to help build connections, further promoting brand awareness and identity. 

Generate interest and new business

Once a business has begun to build brand awareness on social media, they can start targeting new business opportunities. This will be different for specific businesses, but the overall concept of promoting your business to interested or like-minded followers will remain the same. Many social media platforms have the added benefit of advertising capabilities as well, which will help to boost organic marketing efforts. By putting time, attention, and some money into paid advertising, your business can be promoted to a portion of the billions of active users on social media. Not only can this help a business grow their sales, but it will continue building a list of people who have interacted with your ads and can represent future sales opportunities.

Gain data that can be used for brand development

Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter provide interesting data that can be used to help develop better content for company pages. While the data mentioned previously from targeted ads is incredibly useful, there’s an entirely separate component of data that can be accessed for brand development. This collection of data is called “user insights,” on most platforms. Essentially these metrics track the behavior of your audience giving you information on how your followers interact with specific content and also includes a breakdown of user attributes such as location, gender, and age. With this information, businesses can create content that they know their followers will interact more favorably with, which will strengthen their online presence and community.

Boost your SEO efforts

With the right content and tactics, social media can also help to bring more traffic to your site and help improve SEO through link building. Content ideas on social media are endless, but they should be focused on ways to positively affect your business. One way to do this is by sharing content from your website, like a blog post, to a social media page. Interested followers who read the content you’ve shared will be directed back to your website, where they may also explore other aspects of your site while there. They also then have the ability to share that content with their followers, which may spark another share from a follower of theirs who connected with your content, and so on. Additionally, like-minded peers within your industry who discuss or write similar content can use your original blog post as a source for their own, creating a back-link directly to your site. This is both favorable for SEO and furthers your brand development as a trusted source within the online community. Because social media has such an active community, it is one of the simplest ways to share content with such a large audience. 

Social media is a dynamic group of channels and platforms. It’s important to keep a pulse on all updates and trends in order to optimize your brand strategy. And while the above aspects of social media and social media marketing are very beneficial, they are only a few of the ways businesses of any size can gain momentum from using them. Businesses that put the time and effort into continuing to learn about social media while using the platforms to build their brand will have more success with a social media presence in the long run. 

Located in downtown Lancaster, PA, and serving York PA and Harrisburg, Taylor Brand Group is able to offer a wide range of services including full marketing agency and ad agency capabilities. With branding expertise in brand development, rebranding, brand messaging, public relations, and various other marketing services, Taylor Brand Group provides a fresh perspective on tried and true industry tactics. To learn more about our team, visit us on social media or contact us today to see how we can help.