4 Ways Social Media Helps Solve Common Business Problems

Businesses looking to grow their customer base and increase sales often run into the same types of problems:

• Their customers can’t find them easily online
• They need more customers
• They can’t stay in touch with their existing customers
• They need feedback from their customers

Businesses do a number of different things to solve these problems. Some run television or radio adver­tise­ments to find new customers. Other businesses send out print offers to past customers to get them back in the door.

But more and more, businesses are turning to social media to help solve these common problems.

Over the next few weeks we’re going to dive into why your business should use social media to solve these problems and how you can get started, but first let’s take a closer look at how social media helps fix each problem.

Problem #1: Their customers can’t find them easily online

Not being easily found by your customers is a huge problem for many businesses. You can have a great website and an outstanding product or service, but if your customers can’t find you, what’s the point?

While many businesses enlist the help of search engine optimization (SEO) experts to help get more traffic to their site, they ignore social media because they don’t think it can have real ROI. But did you know social media can affect your SEO efforts?

What you post on your social channels (and whether or not your fans are sharing it with friends), how frequently you update your commu­nities and allowing people to share content from your website to social media can all affect your search engine rankings.

Social media and SEO work together to ensure your customers easily find accurate, relevant infor­mation about your company.

(If this has piqued your interest, keep an eye out for next week’s article on how social media can help SEO to improve your rankings.)

Problem #2: They need more customers

I’ve never heard of a business that doesn’t have this problem oppor­tunity. We’re all looking for new ways to grow our customer base. (And if you’re a marketer for a business, that’s your job.)

Guess what, social media can help with this business goal, as well. You can use social media to offer special promo­tions to customers, launch marketing campaigns to get people inter­ested in a product and run paid adver­tise­ments (much like PPC ads) to drive traffic to your website.

Problem #3: They can’t stay in touch with their existing customers

If you’re like most businesses, you receive 25% to 40% of your revenue from existing customers. So staying in touch with your customers is crucial to your company’s well-being.

(And even if the old saying that ​“it costs 5 times more to acquire a customer than to retain a customer” is a myth, we all know there is extreme value in customer loyalty.)

Social media is an effective, low-cost way to stay in front of your customers and keep them up-to-date with what your business can offer to them.

Problem #4: They need feedback from their customers

Customer feedback is one of the best ways to under­stand what your business is doing well and where improve­ments need to be made. One of the best ways to get this valuable feedback is to actually listen to your customers.

And your customers are talking. How will you be part of the conver­sation if you’re not around to respond?

In addition, review sites and social media commu­nities have become the go-to resource for people looking to find new businesses or talk about their experi­ences with businesses. In fact, over 70% of Americans read reviews before making a purchase decision.

Social media allows you to get valuable feedback from customers about new products, services or about how their experience was with your company.