When we ask ourselves whether social media marketing is a worthwhile investment for a business owner, the answer is readily apparent. The thousands of companies advertising or maintaining accounts on social media platforms argue that, over time, social media has proven itself as a valid platform for building business.
Social media drive sales? It indeed does drive sales by the very nature of it being free, open, and available to all. Whether you’re operating a business-to-business or business-to-consumer company, the message is the same. Proper social media strategy can lead to excitement, interaction, and visibility – all things crucial to growth.
Social Media Drive Sales
Excitement
Social media is the grassroots marketing campaign of the Internet age, and if you think of it in those terms it starts to make a lot of sense. Engage with customers on a one-to-one level, then allow them to talk to each other and to those who haven’t yet been exposed to your business, and suddenly you’ve built some real momentum for your business.
It doesn’t happen overnight, but social media and its shareability drive a steady snowballing of excitement over time. This is represented in numbers like Facebook or Twitter followers, all of whom are connected with each other and engaged with your brand.
Excitement leads directly to sales. Constant discussion leaves your business top-of-mind far more often than without social media, thereby making it that much more likely for potential customers to turn real.
Interaction
Social media is also the knowledgeable clerk behind the counter of the Internet age. While it’s incredibly hard for those mom-and-pop stores to compete with larger corporations these days, it’s undeniable that those smaller, more personable stores made connections with people on a far deeper level.
Relationships with potential customers via social media aren’t born of simply providing content and a site to mitigate transactions. Social media breeds trust by providing that electronic version of a counter over which you and your future customers can interact, discuss issues, and learn about each other.
Interaction leads directly to sales as well. Emotional connections breed trust, even when that trust is between someone buying and someone selling.
Visibility
Social media is the market stall in the town square of the Internet age. People get together in this virtual town square who already have connections, whether those connections be geographical in nature or based on a shared interest. Just as a market vendor will not sell his produce from his own farm, neither should your business operate solely from the confines of your site.
When your business develops a significant social media presence, suddenly what you have to offer is being seen by far more people than otherwise. Building out a broad social media strategy and following it through will immediately reach entire communities, and over time will allow your business and its base of potential customers to grow along with those communities.
Finally, visibility does lead directly to sales. Increased audience size means that there’s a far greater pool of potential customers from which any one of them could have a need to be met by your business.
Social media is a significant force in our culture today, and it’s not going away. Likewise, it can’t be ignored as a powerful tool in the arsenal of the business owner looking to connect with customers and grow the business.
Excitement, interaction, and visibility are broad concepts to tackle here, but the principle is sound. Engaging in a consistent way with social media will make your business mean more to more people, and that will always lead to better sales numbers.
