The importance of social media for business cannot be understated. Today it has become one of the most important platforms for marketers trying to grow their brand’s awareness among their prospective consumers. According to Facebook, there are 50 million business pages active on Facebook and they receive around 2.5 million comments on their page every month.

Also, around 78% of salesmen are using social media to outperform their competitors.This just goes to show how big of a role social media is playing in making of a successful business.

But how exactly does social media affect your business? Here is a list on how your business can leverage social media platforms to grow its brand.

Communicate with you audience faster and easier

According to Smart Insights , , 63% of customers expect companies to offer customer services through social media channels and 90% users have used social media platform to talk to brands or businesses.

Thus, it’s clear that customers have already taken social media channels as a communication point between them and brands. Having social media handles would let you interact with your customers, give them support and also gather constructive feedbacks.

Always remember, in today’s day and age, your competitors are just one click away, and if you are not there for your customers, they can easily shift to other brands.

Increase Brand awareness

A brand without brand awareness among its consumers is as good as a commodity. Building awareness is one of the fundamental tasks while building a brand. And when people know your brand, they use your brand and recommend your brand.

According to Yahoo Small Business, 53% people recommend companies and products on Twitter. There are 326.1 million active social media users in India and each one can advocate for your brand. Social media lets you reach these many people for free. You can increase your brand awareness by creating quality content and viral, sharable content for people among other ways.

By giving your brand a personality

Giving your brand a personality gives it a human touch, a factor that greatly increases the trust your consumers put on your brand. Brands like Zomato, Durex have used social media to showcase their playful ad open minded personality to their consumers, and consumers love it.

Social media gives you a free platform not only for promotions but also to create human centric content.

Increasing your website traffic and generating leads

Yahoo Small Business report says that 64% of Twitter users and 51% of Facebook users are more likely to buy the products of brands they follow online. And with an average ad click through rate of 1.9%, social media has become a very convenient platform to reach your consumers and take them to your webpage and generate leads and sales.

According to HubSpot, link clicks account for 92% of all interactions on Twitter. Thus, by posting interesting content that readers would want to click on and share can greatly increase your website traffic.

As for lead generation, you can use ads to see if users are interested in your product and qualify those leads.

Collecting useful insights and feedback

Listening to social media conversations can give you some very useful insights about your brand and about your consumers. But according to Brandwatch, 96% of the people that discuss brands online do not follow those brands’ owned profiles. Thus, it is important to not only listen to your followers but to all conversations concerning your brand.

Listening to online conversations not only gives you insights about customer’s habits, it also lets you measure the sentiments of your consumer regarding your brand. Both of these are very important to build your brand in the right direction.

Listening to conversation related to your competitors can also tell you a lot about your competition and information holds a very important place in marketing wars. Listen to what people like about your competitors while forming your communications so that you can one up your competition.

Thus, social media as a tool can contribute a lot in growth and development of your business. Strategic use of social media is thus very important for any business.