Social media marketing is using social media networking sites to lure potential customers to your business website in the hopes of getting them to take notice of what you have to offer and making a sale.  The availability and use of social is growing quickly.  It is becoming the tool of choice for current and future generations.  These are the top 10 reasons to use social media marketing.

1.  Increased Brand Recognition:

Social media is another avenue to reach potential customers and existing customers.  A single message in social media could be shared tens of thousands of times with others across the world who wouldn’t otherwise know about your brand.  Social media messages travels the world instantly.  Social media also gives you the ability to know what others think about your brand and respond to them in real time. 

2.  Build Brand Loyalty:

A study conducted by “Convince&Convert” found that 53% of Americans who follow brands in social media are more loyal to those brands.  Customers want to interact with their favorite brands.  They want to have a relationship with their brands.  Consumers want to voice their support of criticism of the products they buy.  Social media is the perfect platform for enabling this type of interaction.  You can also build brand loyalty by offering rewards and incentives through social media.

3.  Lower Marketing Cost:

Social media lets you reach millions of customers with just an investment of time.  Opening a social media account with sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Vine, etc. cost nothing.  You can open an account and start reaching a large audience in a matter of minutes.  An investment of an hour per day can go a long way to reaching your target audience and growing your business.

4.  Greater Visibility:

Social media gives you the opportunity to generate traffic to your company’s website and significantly increase the visibility of your business.  The more social media accounts you have the greater the opportunity to increase visibility of your business.  Using the most popular social media networks is a good strategy to employ.

5.  Build A Better Product/Provide Better Service:

Social media helps you to build a better product or provide better service because of the ability to quickly get customer feedback.  Those feedback can be used to tweek products and services before doing a full roll out.  Do a limited roll out of the product or service, gain realtime feedback from social media and use that information to correct problems identified by customers and offer a better product or service.

7.  Social Media is the New Media:

Social media is becoming the new mass media that people are turning to.  Billions of people now use social media and this number is growing significantly year after year.  Individuals are speiding more and more time getting news, information, entertainment, shopping and interacting on social media.  Even traditional TV shows are being linked to social media.  To be successful businesses must cease this opportunity and adopt social media.  The beauty about social media is that it is free and easy to use. 

8.  Enhance Company Trustworthiness:

Social media gives you the ability to interact with your customers on a personal level.  This personal social interaction lets your customers know that there are real people on the other end who care about their feedback and not some machine or black hole into which their complaints disappear with no respnose.  Humans build trust through interactions.  A business is not different.  People are at the heart of every business. 

9.  Finance A Business:

Social media can be used to help finance your business.  With the advent of crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter, GoFundMe, etc.   social media has become the driving force to bring potential donotors to these sites to fund your business.  Crowdfunding requries that you build a social media audience that you can then use to solicit donations from.  (learn more about crowdfunding). 

10. Greater Sales:

Building your brand, building brand loyalty and getting better search engine rankings will enable you to increase sales.  Greater sales is what every entrepreneur is after.