Technology’s nonstop advancements are changing the world of business. Today, businesses are much more efficient with the time and costs necessary to carry out their day-to-day tasks. As time flies past, there’s one aspect of technology that stands above the rest – social media.

Social media has grown significantly over the past ten years. It’s allowing individuals to connect and share ideas with their peers from all around the world. Yet in the business sphere, social media is often overlooked.

We’ve pulled together the 3 areas that social media has touched most profoundly, along with some tips for how small biz owners can tap into the power of social.

Brand Exposure

As social media becomes increasingly apparent, it’s important for businesses to view this opportunity as a tactic to exponentially increase brand awareness. With this in mind, a multitude of businesses misunderstand this and view social media as a direct sales generation tactic. Oftentimes this leads to spamming the small audience they have with useless advertisements.

Businesses need to understand that social media is a “top of the funnel” marketing technique, used to spread awareness of the company and its service. Studies have shown that 92% of marketers have seen branding growth simply by investing as few as six hours per week in social media. Get online. Have conversations. Give customers a reason to want your products.

Customer Service

With the rise of social media, customers are growing more likely to use it as a direct conversation window between themselves and businesses. Small businesses need to ensure they’re actively using social media to respond to any customer service requests. Nothing is worse than a question being ignored in front of an entire sea of potential customers.

Studies have uncovered that 78% of customers are swayed by a company’s social media presence when making purchase decisions. Customer service via social media is becoming increasingly important when it comes to gaining new customers and impressing existing customers.

Inbound Marketing

Along with the growth of technology, we’re seeing inbound marketing tactics become more effective when it comes to online marketing. Inbound marketing has been around for nearly a decade, but not until recently have we seen positive returns on the expenses of inbound marketing. As evidence, studies show that there are 31% more bloggers now than there were in 2010.

Much of this growth can be accredited to social media’s increased relevancy, as marketers are better equipped to get their content out in front of interested readers all over the world. Social media has pushed marketers to create useful content that’s designed to encourage individuals to share it among their audiences. Creating informational content within your industry is a sure-fire technique to increase your business’ positive reputation – thanks to social media, this is becoming increasingly easy.

Get Social

If these reasons to kickstart your business’ social media, then here’s one more: IT’S FREE. You can’t argue with a totally free way to take your small biz marketing one step further and reach and even larger audience.

So no more excuses – if you’re ready to dive in, we can help you get social in as little as ten minutes a week.

How has social media affected your business?