Even if your ideal clients don’t spend much time hanging out on social media sites, there are very real search engine benefits to being active on social media. For one thing, your various social media platforms will include the opportunity to include a link back to your website, which supports search engine activity. What’s more, when people search for what you offer, it’s quite possible that the search engines will pick up your social media platform information, thereby enabling you to show up more powerfully online. And, indeed, many people perform searches on the social media sites themselves to find content that’s relevant to them. If you have a presence there, you have the opportunity to show up in those searches, which will lead people to your platform profile and thence on to your website, where you can start a conversation that might lead to a sale.

A Word on Cost

If you’ve ever bought advertising space in a traditional newspaper or magazine, you know how painful it can be to part with thousands of dollars for an ad that might, or might not, get seen by your ideal customer. Although the news outlet in whose publication you are advertising might be able to tell you it has a circulation of 100,000, that doesn’t mean that every single one of those people are looking for what you’re selling, and it certainly doesn’t guarantee that they will ever notice the ad you’ve agreed to buy. You can get a lot more exposure to your target audience online, and you can determine to a much greater degree who is seeing your ads online, than you ever could with a print magazine. You still have to be targeted with your online advertising and marketing dollars, but the internet is set up to facilitate being found. You will have manpower costs associated with ensuring that someone is cultivating your “social media garden,” and if you decide to do some online advertising, that can cost you money as well; but if your online presence is strategically managed, your dollars are far more likely to generate results than advertising in traditional media. And this, too, can take some time.

You are also much closer to your customers and potential customers online than ever before: people can post reviews of your products and services, rate customer service and ask questions or express their concerns directly to you through your social media platforms. Which gives you the opportunity to build good relationships with your customers. You need to be on top of all of this, however, and this is why some companies are now hiring social media community managers.

There’s a lot involved in all of this and it takes a fair bit of finesse to take a social media presence and turn it into the type of activities that support revenue generation. If you’d like to know more about how me and my team can help you with that, please get in touch with me at susan@crossmancommunications.com. We’d love to help you with that!