Social media is more than a digital billboard: It allows you to connect directly with your ideal clients and gain powerful insights. Social media has a significant impact on your business, from customer service to recruitment to research.
Social media can affect your business in 9 different ways.
Nine ways that social media can directly impact businesses at each stage of the customer’s journey.
Social media transforms customer service.
Social media customer service is an essential part of omnichannel support. Customers tag and directly Message brands to resolve issues across platforms and expect a swift, helpful, and personalized response. Index data shows that more than three-quarters of consumers wish to receive a reply on social media within 24 hours.
Customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention are all affected by response rates. Implementing a seamlessly supported strategy allows you to drive revenue growth and increase the lifetime value of your existing customers. A well-orchestrated approach to customer service can also provide valuable insights into your customers’ experiences that will help you evolve your business.
It can be difficult for a support team to keep up with multiple social platforms. Using Sprout Social’s smart inbox, your customer service teams can unify all social channels to create a single stream for monitoring incoming messages, fostering conversations, and responding to audiences more quicker.
You can benchmark and track the performance of your support team to find new ways to improve customer service. The Activity Report gives you a comprehensive view of the social care efforts made by your team, including trends regarding message volume and response rate.
Brand awareness through social media
The Index data shows that consumers prefer content from brands featuring products or services or customers demoing/reviewing the products. These statistics prove that social media is the place where consumers discover brands. It’s a powerful tool for increasing awareness.
Brand awareness is a great way to gain new leads, beat the competition, and drive sales.
Social media data can also gauge your brand’s current awareness. Sprout’s Competitor Analysis Report, for example, reveals your position in comparison to the competition using metrics such as share of voice and positive sentiment. It also includes total engagements, overall conversation volume, and total engagements. These insights can influence your entire company’s competitive strategy on social media and beyond.
Your brand will remain relevant with social media.
Social media is the place where today’s trends are born. Keeping your finger on social media would help if you stayed on top of the latest trends that are relevant to your audience.
Brands that abandon or retire from their social media presence are at risk of irrelevance and being abandoned by their communities. Social media is critical to creating a brand strategy for the long term that will keep you top-of-mind in years to come.
It’s important to listen in on conversations around your industry and brand, mainly when fierce competition for consumer attention exists. Social Listening allows you to listen and analyze what is said about your business, even if it’s not tagged. With Sprout, you can create a Topic to gather data that will allow you to observe trends, uncover patterns, and gauge emotional reactions toward your brand, products, and hashtags.
Sales strategy gets a boost from social media.
Social media is a constant presence in the sales funnel. Social plays a vital role in acquiring customers. From organic campaigns that generate awareness to commerce that supports transactions, it is a powerful tool.
The Index states that sales strategy is the most common use of social data. Social media allows you to understand your customers’ needs better and wants. You can optimize your entire sales strategy using their feedback, from social selling to website design to customer outreach.
Other metrics, such as engagement, can be correlated with revenue increases, but more is needed to prove their direct impact.
With a tool such as Sprout Social’s Tableau BI Connector, you can analyze data, create customized metrics and combine different data sources. This customized and seamless view provides a single source of truth to understand your business and its performance better. It also gives you an accurate perception of the impact of social media on revenue.
Stoneacre Motor Group, for example, used Sprout to gather essential audience insights that informed their sales strategy. They generated social leads that amounted to PS1 million in annual sales.
How social media can help build a community for your brand
According to 41% of marketers, brands actively engaging with and responding to their communities on social media are culturally relevant. A community allows people who emotionally connect to your brand to interact with one another and your company. There are already many people who love your brand. Your brand community is already on social media. You have to locate it.
Relationships with existing and potential clients make them feel appreciated, increasing brand loyalty and evangelism. Social media communities for brands are potent tools, enabling companies to interact with their most passionate advocates in real time. You can test new products, gather feedback, and share content within your social community.
Employees can become brand ambassadors through social media.
Employees satisfied with their work will post on social media to promote the company. Your employees can help you reach more people without straining the budget or bandwidth of your social media campaigns. It’s a win for both parties.
According to Sprout’s Employee Advocacy report, posting company content can help employees achieve their daily tasks and long-term objectives. Employees say sharing social media content can help external audiences understand the brand’s values. It also provides new leads and opportunities to engage, allowing them to communicate important messages within their company.