Marketing · 26 Oct 2021 · 3 min read

Social media marketing for business: why it works, and where to start

Billions of people use social platforms daily, which makes them one of the few channels where a small business can reach an audience it could never afford to buy on television. The industry keeps growing, and it is not going anywhere.

The question is rarely whether to be on social media. It is what you should expect from it, and which platforms are worth the hours.

What an active social presence actually does

It costs almost nothing to start. A business account on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn is free. Paid promotion costs extra once you want scale, but even then it is a fraction of print or broadcast.

It makes you findable. Customers who do not know a brand exists cannot buy from it. Most buyers now research a business online before spending anything, and they look past the website at how active and authentic the brand is elsewhere.

It reaches people who were not looking for you. Search finds you when someone already has the problem. Social puts you in front of people before that. The trick is concentrating on the platforms your audience already uses rather than spreading thin across all of them.

It gives you a direct line to customers. Polls, comments and direct messages surface feedback you would otherwise have to pay for — including the negative kind, which is the useful kind.

It builds loyalty when you answer. Resolving a query quickly and publicly shows every other reader how you handle problems. Customers who feel heard stay.

It sends traffic to your site. Every post is a path back to a page that sells something. The more useful the content, the more consistently that traffic shows up.

It supports search. An active, well-maintained presence is a credibility signal, and sharing your content consistently helps the pages behind it — see why your website is not ranking on Google for what else feeds that.

Choosing a platform

Platform size matters less than fit. Before picking one, answer three questions: is your audience actually active there, does the format suit what you have to say, and how many platforms can you realistically maintain well?

Facebook is the largest general-purpose network and a large share of its users check in daily, following business pages, groups and events. A reasonable default for most brands.

X (formerly Twitter) is not a lead-generation engine, but it is fast. It works for real-time updates and for replying to one customer in public, where everyone else can see how you handled it. Its user base is smaller and more engaged than Facebook’s.

LinkedIn is built for B2B. Prioritise it if your customers are other businesses rather than individual consumers.

Instagram rewards genuinely visual products. Visual content outperforms plain text almost everywhere, and a brand that can hold attention with images and short video builds a following there quickly.

Pinterest has outgrown the niche it was originally associated with and now works for brands of most kinds, provided the content is visual.

YouTube is the second-largest search engine after Google. The video does not need to be highly produced — clear and decent quality is usually enough.

Where to start

Pick one platform your audience is demonstrably on, post consistently for three months, and reply to everyone. That beats six half-maintained profiles by a wide margin.

If you would rather it were somebody’s job, our digital marketing team runs social, search and content together, with targets agreed up front.