Considering that two out of three Internet users throughout the world spends time actively participating on social media, you probably don’t need convincing about the influence social platforms offer businesses of every size. Americans spend an average of 2.7 hours on social media every day, which makes platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram some of the most effective avenues of reaching your business’ target audience.

Today, most businesses have already jumped on board the social media train and have invested a lot of time and money creating relationships with their audience. This means that most businesses have established some kind of presence of the social media platforms that matter most to their audience. However, despite all the attention social media marketing has received, the medium limits users to posting updates every day or two and replying to comments from customers as they appear.

In reality, you can do so much in this medium with very little effort. Here are a few things social media allows businesses to accomplish that no other channel can provide.

Develop An Understanding Of Your Customer Base

Social media platforms allow businesses to analyze and track every action their followers preform with just a few button clicks. With the use of demographic and behavioral data, business can truly begin to understand the motivations and actions of their target audience. Knowing what types of media your audience most frequently consumes, the times of day they’re most active, which brands they purchase and what they do with their free time provides your business valuable information that better enables you to sell to your audience.

However, that’s not all social media platforms allow you to do.

These platforms make a great forum for recognizing your best customers and helping to make them feel valued and important. The fleeing moments of fame you provide a single customer with a social media post costs your business nothing but can create a lasting bond and a lifetime customer.

Influence Their Actions

What you post on social media platforms offers a great tool for enabling how you influence your target audience. From posts that amuse to posts that inform, you can accomplish a range of goals simply through what you post.

You can clearly see examples of how social media platforms can influence a target audience by just looking at recent history. President Obama’s presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012 forever changed how politicians viewed the role social media could play in an election. The Arab Spring in the Middle East was largely made possible due to the social activism displayed through social media channels. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge that dominated social media platforms for most of 2014 helped the organization raise over $220 million worldwide.

These examples just prove that no matter your cause or business, social media platforms offer a compelling way to influence any target audience.

Create Content With Your Audience

In the pre-Facebook world of marketing, businesses would develop advertising campaigns designed to extoll the virtues of their brand in hopes of striking the right tone that would connect with their target audience. In other words, a whole lot of things needed to go right for businesses to make a deep enough impression with their audience to be remembered by them when it was time to make a purchase.

Social media has removed much of the blind luck aspect behind the creation of a successful advertising campaign. Business now have the ability to create content that’s custom designed to the exact taste of their target audience and publish the content on their feeds across a variety of social platforms. Pushing the boundaries of what’s possible on social media allows businesses to take their marketing even further by inviting users to create content with them, giving the target audience an even greater sense of ownership over a brand and its message.

Target Local Users

In the past, marketers had to distribute their message to a wide audience and hope that it eventually caught on with its smaller intended target audience. However, with the availability of geo-targeting, marketers now have the ability to target individual communities with pay-per-click advertising or even go smaller with in-store push notifications. Customer targeted advertising delivered to exactly the intended audience makes marketing your business’ message simpler and more direct than ever before.

 

It’s easy to take social media platforms for granted. But remembering the doors a well-designed campaign can open for your business means better success now and in the future.