Are there any businesses that aren't on social media? Successful businesses? (This doesn't count if a business used to be on social media and then for PR reasons shut down their accounts.. cough cough Spoons!)
If you were to start a new business today, a website, a business bank account, a logo, business cards and of course social media would all be the first things to sort out and then you're up and running.
My guess is that you already have social media set up for your business, but why does it need social media so much?
The first reason is brand awareness as everyones attention and eyeballs are on these platforms, that's where you need to place your business; in front of as many potential customers as you can. Now brand awareness is a word I hate, it can be used as a lazy term when marketing managers send an email campaign out that has zero opens... you post on social media and the world can see it, sadly though the world won't see it; only a very small percentage of the world will.
This brings me on to the next point, targeted ads, social media is no longer a 'post for free and everyone sees it' type of place, Facebook especially is now very much a pay to play platform for businesses. The beauty with facebook ads is that they are so cheap at the moment, they can targeted to certain ages, locations, people with certain interests or attached to certain groups. You can't do that with a newspaper advert can you ;) Give Facebook ads a try, don't just boost a post, delve into facebook ads and put £10 behind a post that's already had plenty of interest, target the advert to your local area and see what happens.
The last main reason why I think your business needs social media is that you can now drive measurable traffic to your website, every day. Post interesting blogs, articles, FAQs and other great stuff about your business and create a thriving surge of traffic to your site from social media. Creating content that is educational, interesting or entertaining will create traffic, which in turn may create new customers; it can be content in the form of a blog, video content or both.
