Build Your Online Reputation with Social Media

Social media is another way of communicating with customers and prospects, creating a community around your company. Each platform requires its own strategy. You can celebrate your employees in one, give advice on your expertise in another, and show the world how your customers are benefitting from your services and products.

What social media is used for
Social media is used to tell your company’s story in a way that is both interesting and valuable to current and potential future customers. If you are posting in a regular pattern and have relevant information, it allows your followers to identify with your brand. Someone who follows your company is there to learn, to be entertained, or to be able to reference a thought leader.

There are 3.2 billion social media users around the world, with 2.32 billion active monthly users on Facebook alone. Facebook is joined by 326 million monthly users of Twitter, 1 billion monthly users of Instagram (which has 500 million daily users), and 530 million user profiles on LinkedIn. That is a very large audience that companies are able to put their brand, messaging, and stories in front of.

Even more important than just the number of users however, is how long each user is typically engaged on a social media platform. The longer people are on there to communicate with friends, get their daily dose of news, or just scroll through their feed, the more opportunity you have to make a connection with them. As of last year, across all platforms in the entire world, individual users spent an average of 2 hours and 22 minutes per day on social media platforms.

Benefits of using social media
We all know and have heard that social media builds your brand and allows you to engage with potential customers. But in addition to building a community around your brand, social media also allows you to position yourself as an expert in your field or industry. Creating and sharing useful information and tips in the form of articles or videos can lend your brand a sense of credibility you wouldn’t have otherwise. You also have the ability to quickly see and respond to customer grievances in the form of comments and direct messages.

More than just building an image and reputation, social media increases real traffic to your website and improves your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) by increasing the chances that it will be found by search engines. According to the Social Media Examiner, 79% of marketers said they saw increased traffic with as little as 6 hours a week invested in social media marketing.

Social media for B2B companies
Most people recognize the importance of social media as a key part of business-to-consumer (B2C) advertising strategies. The idea is simple, you build a community and develop your brand with consumers who then decide to buy your product because they recognize and trust you. But social media is equally as important to for business-to-business (B2B) companies.

It is often true that in business-to-business situations, due to smaller customer bases and higher price points, you often can’t count on impulse buys of consumers after they see your posts for a while. However, you can reach the people who make the decisions within organizations. It is estimated that 84% of C-level and VP-level buyers are influenced by social media when purchasing.

More than 70% of all B2B marketers use at least one of the four largest social media sites, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, to distribute their content and tell their stories. The majority of social media B2B leads come from LinkedIn at about 80%, with Instagram quickly trying to catch up.

Develop your customer base with social media
Social media is focused on nurturing relationships to build loyalty and brand advocacy. Although it may not directly drive sales for B2B enterprises, its value rests in building a buyer’s interest in a brand over time. Social media is a soft tool that supports hard metrics, such as sales or customer retention.

The hardest part about social media is getting your staff to share stories about what is going on in your company! Once that part is put in motion, there is never a shortage of something to talk about. At Winsby, we set up ways to make it easy for your staff to communicate stories to us to post.