It’s simple – social media is no longer optional for your business. Your customers are already using it. Your competitors are already using it. In fact, 5.07 billion people around the world are using social media every day! But how can you use social media for your organisation effectively, and how exactly does it benefit your business, anyway?
Imagine having a powerful platform for marketing, competitor analysis, market research, customer communication, sales, brand visibility, customer support, and even real time feedback – all in one place, where your customers already spend their time, AND it's completely free to use! This is why social media has the potential to become the ultimate business tool, ready to drive growth, engagement, and long term success.
At this stage, millions of brands have already proven the power in driving business success. So this is no longer a trial and error platform. It’s a proven strategy to boost brand visibility, drive business growth, and optimise customer engagement.
But it’s important to remember that each social media platform has a different audience and tone, so your brand won’t suit them all. However, users typically engage with an average of 6.7 different social networks per month, making it essential for your business to establish a presence across a few platforms at least. Tailoring your content to fit each platform’s unique style and user expectations is key to achieving the best results.
This blog explores how social media can benefit your business by increasing your brand’s visibility, boosting engagement, and unlocking its full potential.
What’s in this article:
- Four ways social media builds your brand and increases online visibility
- How to use social media to drive customer engagement and business growth
- Choosing the right social media platform for your business
- Key takeaways
Four ways social media builds your brand and increases online visibility
Over half of the world’s population uses social media, so there’s no surprise that these platforms have the potential to boost your brand and offer unparalleled visibility, expanding your online reach like never before. But users aren’t just interacting with each other – they’re interacting with brands and businesses too. Recent data suggests that a huge 90% of social media users follow at least one brand, with active participation across all demographics, from Gen Z to Baby Boomers. This is why social media should be an essential part of a business' marketing strategy.
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Here are four key ways that social media can build your brand and increase its online presence.
1. Brand recognition
Social media offers a great opportunity for your business to be seen loud and proud. Before engaging with a brand, customers often turn to social platforms to assess its reputation, helping them decide whether a business aligns with their own values and expectations. This is why it’s important to maintain consistent messaging and visual branding across your platforms, as it allows you to reinforce your brand’s identity and make it instantly recognisable. With the right PR and marketing strategy, your brand can even gain viral status, reaching not only loyal customers but a much larger audience.
User-generated content (UGC) such as reviews, photos, and videos are all ways to build credibility and strengthen your brand’s reputation. Hashtags also play a key role in making your brand discoverable by the right people. By using relevant hashtags, you provide context for your posts, driving more traffic and boosting engagement. Social media allows businesses to gain traction both nationally and internationally – an opportunity that would have been far more difficult and much more costly before the ‘digital age’.
2. Cost-effective advertising
Most of the time social media platforms are free, making them a highly cost effective option for marketing, allowing you to target specific audiences, track analytics, and increase campaign turnarounds.
A solid and consistent strategy helps you build trust and credibility with your audience over time, leading to a genuine organic online reach. By focusing on engaging content and authentic interactions, you can grow your following naturally, increasing brand visibility and providing long term value without the need to spend on ads.
Social media does offer paid ads, which allow businesses to boost posts and profiles with small payments. Flexible ad budgets make this option accessible to businesses of all sizes, helping to quickly expand reach or target specific demographics. While paid ads can deliver immediate results, a solid organic strategy can complement these efforts and create lasting impact without the continuous costs and over reliance on one digital marketing tactic.
3. SEO and content distribution
By offering a platform for content and campaign distribution, social media can enhance SEO performance and increase your online reach. Uploading relevant content and links can enhance visibility and drive traffic to your website. For example, if an Instagram campaign performs well, it has the likelihood of being shared across other platforms, boosting brand awareness and driving potential customers to your site.
Tools like Linktree allow you to easily direct followers to important links, such as your website, other social media profiles, or important content. This tool makes it simple to add multiple links in one place, ensuring followers have quick access to the most relevant information. This can also drive traffic and increase engagement across your website and digital accounts.
When social media drives visitors to your website, key metrics like time on site, bounce rate, and page views improve. These are signals that search engines use to determine the value of your content, and are the metrics that contribute to better search rankings. Search engines prioritise fresh, updated content, and with the ease of updating on social media, you can keep your content current and boost SEO.
Click here to read more on the SEO benefits of digital PR.
4. Influencer partnerships
Working with influencers can give your digital marketing efforts a real boost. By featuring and reviewing your products, they help generate trust in your brand, expand your reach, and introduce your brand to a broader, yet relevant, audience. Influencers connect with their followers, making their endorsements feel authentic and genuine, which then has a significant impact on purchasing decisions.
Influencers are skilled content creators who understand what resonates with their audience. Whether through photos, videos, or stories, influencers create high quality content that highlights your brand in an organic, relatable way. This content often performs better than traditional marketing tactics, as it feels less like an advertisement and more like a personal recommendation – particularly useful when you consider that fewer than 1 in 5 people trust ads. Partnering with influencers can also reduce the pressure on your team to consistently produce engaging content.
How to use social media to drive customer engagement and business growth
As the name implies, social media is built for social connection, and with billions of users, it allows businesses to engage with their customers on a scale like never before. 76% of people say they’d choose to buy from a brand they feel connected to over a competitor. So, how can social media enhance your customer engagement and strengthen those connections to drive business growth?
Direct communication
Social media provides your customers with quick, direct access to your business, cutting out the delays often associated with traditional and ‘old school’ communication methods, like emails or letters. Whether you're announcing a flash sale, answering questions, or sharing important updates, social media marketing allows your business to communicate instantly, and respond to customer needs in real time.
Direct communication also creates a more personal, interactive experience, allowing you to engage with customers one on one. You can listen to their feedback, resolve issues, and build stronger relationships. This immediate response boosts customer satisfaction and strengthens loyalty, as you can quickly meet customer needs and concerns.
Competitor analysis
Social media is one of the fastest and most effective ways to gain insights into your competitors. By tracking their activity across various platforms, you can observe their content strategy, engagement levels, and the types of messaging that resonate with their audience. Social media enables you to see which posts get the most attention, how often they engage with their followers, and what campaigns or promotions they're running.
Social listening and competitor tracking tools like, similarweb and Hootsuite make it easier to monitor competitor activity, giving you valuable data on their strengths and weaknesses. Staying on top of trends and creating relevant, reactive content based on your competitors' strategies also helps ensure your business remains competitive and aligned with industry shifts.
Customer insights and feedback
Customer insights and feedback are easily gathered through interactions like comments, likes, and shares, giving you valuable information about what customers want and how they engage with your content. Feedback can also be collected through direct messages, polls, surveys, and reviews, offering a better understanding of your customers preferences.
This allows you to gather valuable insights without the need for costly research methods. These insights can refine your product offerings, improve customer experiences, and shape more targeted marketing strategies, delivering better results at a lower cost.
Community building
As the world becomes more digital, consumers are increasingly looking for deeper connections with brands. Social media provides an ideal platform to create a sense of community, allowing customers to feel like they're part of something bigger. By creating an engaged and inclusive online environment, brands can build stronger, more meaningful relationships with their audience, transforming followers into loyal customers.
Interactive campaigns, compelling storytelling, active engagement, and the creation of groups or forums are effective ways to enhance community building. This not only develops engagement but also strengthens trust and builds customer loyalty.
Customer support and service
Social media provides a valuable tool for customer support, thanks to its real time communication ability. It allows you to quickly respond to customer inquiries and resolve issues. With the rise of AI, chatbots can automatically handle general queries, ensuring customers receive instant responses. More complex issues can then be escalated to a customer service representative.
Platforms also enable 24/7 availability, allowing customers to reach out at any time, even when your business isn't operating. While chatbots can assist with responses outside business hours, your team can focus on more critical issues during working hours. Including a support and service section in your social platforms can reduce the time spent managing emails, save costs, and improve efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Choosing the right social media platform for your business
Now that you understand the benefits of bringing your business to social media, it's time to choose the right platform(s) for your brand! While it's recommended to use multiple platforms to maximise your online reach and content potential, it can feel overwhelming to decide which one to prioritise – and not all of them will suit your brand and target audience.
Below, you'll find a few of the top social media platforms for businesses, how they're used, and a general demographic breakdown to help guide your decision.
Instagram is primarily a platform for picture and video content and offers various ways to engage your audience. You can post on your feed, share videos on the reels page, and share moments through stories. Incorporating interactive features like polls, questions, and quizzes to stories helps engagement. Instagram also provides the option to go live, creating real time interaction with your followers.
For product based e-commerce businesses, Instagram also offers a marketplace feature, allowing you to sell directly through the platform. Instagram's messaging feature allows businesses to send pre-written responses, create groups, and set up broadcast channels, making it easier to engage with customers.
Instagram has 500 million daily users, with a nearly equal split between men and women. The platform is most popular among 18 to 34 year olds, though users extend across all age groups, including those 65 and older.
TikTok
TikTok is a short-form video platform that allows users to create engaging videos, go live, and sell directly through TikTok Shop. Businesses using TikTok benefit from its highly interactive nature, which encourages direct engagement with audiences. TikTok now allows videos up to 10 minutes long, giving brands more room to share detailed content. Its algorithm prioritises discovery, so consistent posting, creative content, and using popular trends or challenges can significantly boost visibility.
TikTok primarily attracts a younger audience, with 45.1 million daily active users, most of which are in their 20s, though the platform also appeals to users as young as 10. A growing number of Millennials and Gen X are also enjoying TikTok.
X (formerly Twitter)
X is primarily centred around written content, with the option to enhance posts with videos and images. You can ask questions, make statements, include polls, and engage by responding to or reposting content.
Memes and light hearted content are commonly shared on X, allowing you to showcase your business’s personality, take advantage of reactive marketing, and connect with your audience in a fun, authentic way. The direct message feature allows you to use AI responses and engage in personalised conversations with your customers.
X is a platform with a distinct gender difference, as 66.72% of its users are male. It sees 245 million daily active users, with a broad age range from 18 to 65+. However, the majority of users are from Gen X and younger.
Facebook allows businesses to show their brand through a mix of written content, images, and videos, along with targeted ads to reach specific audiences. This platform allows businesses to increase their visibility through organic posts and paid campaigns, as well as encouraging engagement through interactive content such as polls, live videos, and comments. Businesses can connect with their audience, showcase their personality, and respond to customer inquiries in real time, enhancing customer relationships.
Facebook dominates the social media field with 2.085 billion daily active users, making it the most widely used platform by far. While Gen Z and Millennials represent the largest user groups, Facebook remains popular across all age ranges, from 13 to 65+. The smallest demographic is those aged 65+ – yet they still account for approximately 118.8 million people.
LinkedIn is a platform for professional, business related content, including articles, written posts, images, and videos, while also offering advertising options. This platform is ideal for B2B marketing, expert commentary, and networking, allowing businesses to establish their credibility and engage with other professionals. LinkedIn offers a range of tools such as company pages, job postings, and sponsored content which allows businesses to connect with potential clients, partners, and talent in a more formal, professional way than other platforms. The platform also encourages conversation through comments, shares, and direct messages to build professional relationships and create business growth.
LinkedIn has 310 million monthly active users, with 16.2% of them logging in daily. As a more professional focused platform, its daily usage tends to be less consistent compared to others. The 25-34 age group dominates, making up 60% of the platform's users.
Key takeaways
- Social media is essential for business. With over 5 billion daily users worldwide, it’s a free, powerful platform for marketing, customer communication, sales, and market research.
- Organic and paid strategies work together. While social media is a free platform, paid advertising can boost visibility. However, a strong organic presence through consistent, engaging content is key for long-term success.
- Each platform serves different purposes. Not all social platforms suit every business. Choosing the right ones based on audience and content style ensures better engagement and results.
- Social media drives customer engagement and insights. Businesses can connect directly with customers, gather valuable feedback, and even provide real-time customer support, helping to build loyalty and trust.
Need help with your social media strategy? Contact us today for expert guidance on growing your brand online.
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