Social media is a vital tool for any business and it appeals to nearly every business type. Whether you are an online shop, a local high street shop or a big brand, social media can have massive benefits for your company. The main benefit of social media for businesses is getting more customers, but there are other added positives too. Things like creating a positive view of your brand, building an online reputation can in turn improve SEO, and social media is a good tool to use to interact with existing customers too whether that be providing support or letting them know about new and exciting products you think they might be interested in.
Facebook have a business page set up option which is great for companies to customise their profile to suit them with company details like address, map, contact details, description and a reviews feature too. The location feature is great because people looking for companies near you can find you on the map when they were not necessarily looking for your specific company. Like personal Facebook profiles you can add standard text posts, images and videos. But in addition to that the business Facebook pages allow you to post jobs, and you can also target posts to certain audiences. For example, if you run a clothing company and are posting about a jumper that would only appeal to the 30+ age range you can tailor that in the post to only show for your followers in that group.
Instagram is a really good tool for any business. Instagram is primarily a photo sharing app (every post must include an image or video) and is a great way to advertise your company through picture. Certain topics on Instagram do really well like food and drink, fitness and clothing/fashion but other businesses can benefit from it too. Hashtags are a good feature on Instagram to help get your posts viewed by potential customers. For example, if you are a gym and have new membership offers you could use hashtags like #gym #gymmembership and your post will show up in users feed who are following those hashtags. Most businesses do well on Instagram but some companies may find that it is not the right thing for them, but it is still worth a go as you are utilising their ever expanding user count which currently stands at over 1 billion active users.
Similar to Facebook Twitter allows you to post photos, videos or just text. Posts are limited to 280 characters per tweet to avoid long spam posts and you can also use hashtags the same way that you do on Instagram. A good feature of Twitter which a lot of companies do is use it to have conversations with your customers to provide support and also post out quick messages to your followers. Whereas Facebook is primarily aimed at posting about just your business, Twitter is a slightly more relaxed environment and a lot of companies utilise it to post about normal things, like comments about trending news stories etc. A good thing about this is when you Tweet about things that are trending on Twitter it increases the likelihood of your post being seen by more people.
There are lots of other social media platforms but the top three are the main ones that can benefit most businesses. There is also platforms like YouTube but if your company doesn’t have any promotional videos then it will not be worth setting it up as you won’t have anything to post.
Overall the main social media platform that a business could use solely on it’s own is Facebook as it has the best all round features. However, it is always better to have more than less so we would strongly advise that if you have the time and resources to have a profile for your business on all of the 3 top platforms that you set them up. Make sure that with any platform you use post lots of content with good quality images as you want to portray the best possible image of your company. You don’t have to pay anything to set up social media profiles yourself so it’s worth a go to see how social media can help your business.
