Everybody is saying that social media is a new must-have for companies to survive, but why? The following are eight top reasons why social media is a vital piece of your marketing strategy.

1) Increase Brand Loyalty and Awareness

Social media creates a more casual environment for your customers to connect with your brand. These connections play a great role in increasing customer retention and brand loyalty. The Social Habit conducted a study in which it found that 53% of Americans who follow brands on social media are more loyal to those brands.

2) Gain Valuable Consumer Insights

Your social media platforms can provide a wealth of data about your customers. With millions of posts, engagements and interests, these platforms collect valuable insights about what customers are looking for and what they respond to. This data is collected and recorded through a variety of means. Facebook, for example, provides an analytics tool to all their pages, which is called Facebook insights. This allows you to track your page engagement and identify trends among your customers.

There are a wide range of external tools that can track and analyze information across all of your social platforms. This is valuable because each social media platform targets a slightly different audience, so analytics for each particular platform might yield slightly different results. However, a tool that looks at all of your social engagement at once provides a more accurate representation of your customer base.

3) Run Targeted Ads with real-time results

Once you have a page on social media you are able to target a specific audience based on interests, location, age or any other demographic. Social ad campaigns can be very successful because they are so specifically targeted. You also have the ability to watch the results of your campaign in real-time, which allows you to alter it if you are not receiving the engagement you are hoping for.

4) Provide rich customer experience

These days, customers have more trust in brands that use social media. It provides the customer with more immediate information and they feel that they can get to know the brand on a more personal level. In fact, social media is often times a first resort for customer service. When people have questions they appreciate the comfort of sending a DM over social media or commenting on a post.

5) Increase website traffic and search ranking

Social media is a great platform for specific calls to action. If you want to direct more website traffic, you can place a ‘button’ with a direct link to your website, or brand your posts with your web address. Google’s search engine rewards pages with high shares on social media. Your search rankings for your website are sure to be higher with the help of your popular social platforms.

6) Find out what your competitors are doing

Keeping up with the Jones just got a whole lot easier with social media monitoring. Your competitors are probably, like you, trying to optimize their social strategy. By monitoring their mentions on social and their post trends you can always stay one step ahead.

7) Geotarget content

Targeting can be applied to more than just an ad campaign. Each piece of content can be directed towards a specific audience using Facebook and Twitter tools for geotargeting. This ensures that your messages are reaching the people that you want to see them. Targeted messages will even be rewarded by being prioritized high in their news feeds.

8) Build relationships

One of the most significant benefits of social media is the ability to establish personal relationships with your customers. You can have one-on-one conversations that otherwise wouldn’t be possible. This dialogue can have strong impact for people before, during and after they do business with your company. This two-way communication is unique to social media and has a great way of personalizing your brand.

Written  by Nicole Richards