Using Social Media to Promote a Business in the UK

A while back, when social media emerged, social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter were reserved for staying in touch with friends and family, and most businesses would not have even considered it as a marketing tool. However, over time, social media has grown to become one of the most important marketing tools for any business that wants to be successful, especially with the emergence of new features such as paid social media advertising.

Nowadays, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and several others have become integral to most businesses marketing strategies. Below is a look at the benefits of using social media to promote businesses, and how various UK businesses can leverage it to their advantage.

Benefits of using social media for your business

As already stated above, social media has grown to become one of the most important marketing tools in the world of business. But how exactly do social media help your business? Below is a look at some of the top benefits of using social media for a business:

1. Increased brand awareness

One of the main benefits of using social media to promote your business is that it helps to expose your brand to more people all over the world, with just a click of a button. Social media platforms also allow sharing of posts, and thus any post you publish on your business’ social media accounts has the chance of being shared and re-shared amongst millions of users. Therefore, by using social media to promote your business, you can be able to reach millions of potential customers all over the world, thus increasing the awareness of your brand.

2. Improved customer insight

Social media allows you to interact with your customers and potential customers, where you can be able to learn their likes, dislikes, what messages appeal to them, etc. Social media also allows your customers to give you a feedback about the products and/or services your business offers. Using this information, you can be able to get a better insight of your target market, which can help you come up with better promotional messages, products, and services. Therefore, social media can help you improve the customer experience your business offered by your business by helping you to understand the market more.

3. Increased website traffic and lead generation

Another major benefit of using social media for business is that it can help to increase the amount of traffic reaching your business website, thus significantly boosting the number of leads your business generates. This is because social allows you to widen your target market, improve targeting by promoting your business only to the interested audience, and widen your reach through social media shares and mentions. Therefore, by using social media, you can be able to target more prospective customers, thus helping to increase your business sales and revenue.

4. Competitor analysis

When it comes to using social media for marketing, it is not only your business that is using it – other businesses including your competitors are most likely using social media platforms. And while this might sound like bad news for your business – increased competition – it is good news in that the use of social media is very public, and thus you can be able to know what your competition is doing. Social media platforms also display, publicly, the people who are friends with or following a person (in this case, a business brand) and thus you can be able to find out the people who make up your competitors’ target market. With this kind of information, you can be able to improve on your marketing strategy, allowing you to gain an edge over your competitors in the market.

How to reap the benefits of social media

From the above benefits of social media, it is quite clear that you should start using social media platforms to promote your business brand if you are not already doing it. However, using social media for business is not as simple as just posting messages about your business on various social media platforms. In order for your business to reap rewards, you must come up with a good social media marketing strategy. If you are considering promoting (or are promoting) your business using social media, below is a look at some tips on how you can maximise the results:

1. Using the right social media management software

Using social media to promote your business is much more than just sending promotional messages for your brand. You must be able to how the audience is receiving and engaging with your messages, find the most effective types of messages to post, know how to optimise your messages, etc. This can be done with the right social media management software tools that help businesses gain the best results when using social media. This way, your business can be able to increase the effectiveness of the social media marketing strategy used, allowing to increase your brand’s online presence and visibility, reach more potential customers, and generate more leads, which, in turn, will lead to more sales, increased revenue, and a bigger bottom line.

2. Hiring the right social media management staff

When using social media, your business also needs to employ the services of social media management specialists, who can be able to effectively implement your social media marketing strategies using the social media management tools mentioned above. These specialists can include:

1) Social media managers who will help you to manage your business’ social media accounts and social media management platforms

2) Social media content editor who will help to come up with the best promotional content for your business to use on social media

3) Social media marketing specialists who will help to come up with effective social media marketing campaigns

4) Paid social media executives who will help to promote your business using paid social media platforms

5) Social media analytics specialists who will track your business’ social media strategies, collect and analyse data, and suggest various ways you can optimise your social media marketing.

All these specialists and many others can help you to optimise your social media use when promoting your business, leading to a significant rise in your business’ customer acquisition and retention. However, to get the best results, you need to hire the best social media job candidates, which means using the right hiring channels. Some of the best methods you can use when hiring include:

1. Advertising your job opening on social media, online job boards, and/or classified websites – this will help to make sure that your job advert reaches several qualified social media job seekers
2. Using a recruitment agency – using a recruitment agency such asSphere Digitalcan help you land the best digital media talent on the market by connecting you with the most qualified digital jobs seekers.