With the ever-increasing popularity of social media and its influence in various spheres of life, it is difficult to measure the impact social media has on businesses.
From small online retail businesses to the major players in the industry, everybody has tried their hand at social media marketing and has mostly achieved success. Let’s go a little deeper and discuss some of the roles social media plays in making or breaking a business.
Audience range
There exists nothing that offers the range of customers as social media does. No matter how hard they tried, traditional marketing always had limits and one of them was the number of audience it could reach. With social media platforms, if the algorithm plays right, a business will earn millions of customers within the shortest period possible, and that too without any additional costs.
Being a space without boundaries, social media helps grow a business among people around the world, transforming it into a global brand.
Customer interaction
Constant communication with the customers is important in the growth of a business, whether in terms of establishing an effective customer support system or understanding their changing preferences that help shape your products or services to match the demand.
Consistent interaction through social media platforms improves the customer experience as well as the customer-brand relationship, creating a space that benefits both the business and the customer.
Transparency
Social media, and the internet in general, gives easy access to data that improves the transparency of any business. You can search for any information that you want to know about a brand and you will have everything you need in your hands in a matter of seconds.
The businesses that show hesitance in revealing necessary information will be perceived with skepticism, which in turn will affect their popularity. Transparency mostly benefits the customers as it gives them power over brands along with an increased number of choices.
Permanence of impressions
Even with an option to delete unnecessary and unwanted information, once you put something out there on the platform, it is permanent. So, the impression that you create with the content you produce will have a lasting impact on your reputation, and whether is it good or bad depends entirely on you.
This is why it is important to be careful about your activities and what you post on a public platform, because it is hard to erase the effect those have on the viewers and you might lose your whole business in a single careless moment.
Brand recognition
Creating brand recognition and awareness through traditional marketing was such a difficult task, which is made easy by social media in the current era.
Even small businesses that create engaging content that can hold the attention of a viewer for a minute or less gain reach like never before and get recognized among the multitude of brands that sell similar products or services.
With increased brand recognition and awareness, such businesses build brand loyalty and an active customer base which wouldn’t have been possible with conventional marketing strategies.
Product/service quality
With the advent of a platform that provides equal opportunity and exposure to everyone, competition increases. Although it might reflect on businesses differently, the impact it will have on the customers will be mostly positive.
In this scenario, brands compete with each other by offering better quality products and services, sometimes at reduced prices, trying to attract more customers to their business.
Marketing cost
All the major social media platforms give access to anyone free of charge, including businesses, which helps reduce marketing and operational costs to a minimum.
Since you can create and post videos on your account without investing an additional amount, you will be able to save a lot of money that you otherwise would have spent buying space or time for your advertisements in conventional media.
Social media marketing does cost a little if you decide to collaborate with influencers to increase reach, but will come back to you in manifold once you establish your brand.
Conclusion
From what we have seen, social media is fully capable of deciding the direction of growth of a business, positive, or negative. It could create lasting impressions that influence the reputation of a brand or make people forget that such a business ever existed.
All of it depends on the work you put in, the originality of your content, and being consistent about it.
