One of the hardest parts of running a small business is just getting noticed. Big companies have millions of dollars to throw behind their advertising campaigns, but small businesses have to work with a budget. On top of that, small business owners often have to manage the advertising themselves instead of big companies’ advertisement teams. But that’s where social media comes in. With social media, you can spend as little as six hours a week promoting your business and at no extra cost. Here are some other benefits of using social media to promote your small business.
Increase brand awareness
Social media is a very cost-effective way to get your brand out there in front of a broad audience. By creating and syndicating content across various social platforms and gaining loyal customers and employees to like and share that content, you can freely reach hundreds if not thousands of potential customers.
It keeps you “top-of-mind”
When people see you post regularly on social media, they remember you, which will come in handy when it’s time for them to do business. For example, if you run a local cafe that posts the daily specials on social media, and you happen to post about a popular sandwich on a given day, that will catch people’s attention and draw them to your business over their lunch break.
Boosts your SEO
SEO is short for search engine optimization, and it measures how high you rank on search results. Ideally, you want to be as close to the top of page one as possible, especially on popular search engines like Google. Posting regularly on social media helps improve your SEO, and it also drives more traffic to your main website, improving your SEO even further.
Higher conversion rates
Your “conversion rate” is the percentage of visits to your website that turn into actual sales. As we mentioned, social media increases the traffic to your website, raises awareness of your brand, and keeps you “top-of-mind,” which translates into a higher conversion rate. After all, it’s natural that more people visiting your website means more people buying your products or visiting your physical store.