Many businesses focus their social media marketing efforts on attracting followers and building customer engagement.  These are by far the greatest value-added social media objectives for business.  At the same time, a comprehensive social media marketing strategy should also take into account the broad range of opportunities and benefits afforded by the social media platform to enable holistic business development activities. 

Perhaps one reason why businesses often miss out on the full range of benefits made possible through their Facebook, Instragram, or other accounts is the fact that many of the value-added benefits of social media are difficult to quantify.  What is the value in a business reputation, and how does a business owner know if their reputation as a business is improving or stagnating? 

While it is difficult to ascertain an RoI for a social media strategy, particularly as it impacts more abstract qualities of a business such as brand value, there is value available for the taking.  The following list provides some insights into detailed categories of social media strategy, ones which can be integrated into the top-level strategy of gaining new customers.

Public relations:  Promotional content placed online must have a purpose for the business and speak of the business’s ethos.  That can be done indirectly, conveyed through the way in which content is presented and the tone that is used in telling stories or depicting graphics, and it can be done directly through messaging which conveys subjective, value-based comments about its products, services or even about the world around us.  Public relations benefits can arise from highlighting a firm’s corporate social responsibility or sustainability initiatives, or otherwise, activities done in support of charities.

Search engine optimization:  As a more technical consideration, social media marketing is more than just gaining followers, but can also play a direct and significant role in increasing your organic search rankings on Google and other search engines.  Increasingly, search engines are looking for businesses which engage with their customers and show an active pattern in posting and customer interaction.  Responding to customers, no matter what their comments are, is a way to show Google that you are an active business and that your business should be featured when someone does a search on relevant topics.  Businesses must also be sure that there is a link between online content and social media accounts.  This link ensures that Google crawlers know what to look out for when indexing sites and ranking for content.

Industry thought leadership:  Social media offers a chance to convey your company’s knowledge of the industry and, in so doing, further establishing your business as a leader.  This leadership role can be conveyed by posting white papers or original research in trending topics, by providing resources and links to other websites which have valuable content (but which are not necessarily a direct business competitor), and highlighting insights you have gained from past interactions with customers.  Your performance metric in this category – when you know that you’re gaining traction in the market with customers – is when you can post information about a trending topic and receive replies from people who either agree or disagree with your viewpoint.  In this case, it is not necessarily important to have the “right” content (the majority view) but to show respect to the full range of opinions and have well-founded reasons to support your own views.

Local leadership:  While thought leadership takes a global view on the positioning of your business, for the vast majority of businesses, interaction with customers will be on a local basis.  Highlighting your roots and your cultural heritage in the local context is a way to identify yourself in the community, creating a natural bond between you and the audience.  More than just creating a bond, many searches by customers are geographic based, often including a “near me” at the end of their search to find a vendor or service provider who is locally based.  As a basic technique, ensure your address and phone number is on the website, and mention of the local area is key, particularly for service businesses which rely on face-to-fact interaction with their customers.

Marketing message development:  A social media marketing campaign should indeed begin with consideration over the main themes and messaging to be conveyed.  Some companies, however, may use social media feedback and customer comments to help develop and hone marketing strategies for future use.  Particularly for those businesses which mainly rely on mass media marketing, social media can be a great testing ground for new ideas in marketing.  Content which receives negative responses or lower engagement can be quickly pulled, while well-performing content can be further developed and refined.  As a proving ground, social media enables greater agility by your business with respect to its overall marketing strategy.

Recruitment:  Business success begets business success.  Not all “customer” engagement is about customers.  By conveying a positive corporate culture, and even including a hint of seeking exceptional talent in occasional posts, people will respond, and you won’t have to spend a single cent to receive employment inquiries from people who you know already have an interest in your industry in general, or specifically in your product or service.

Customer and industry insights:  Social media is as much an opportunity for current or potential customers to learn about your business as it is an opportunity for you to learn about your customers.  This learning opportunity extends beyond analytics and engagement tracking, but into the very heart of what makes social media the amazing medium it is today – genuine personal interaction in all its different forms, including one-on-one chats with individual customers.  While engaging customers directly can be time-consuming, smart questions and bring smart answers.  Social media enables that interaction like no other medium to learn from people that you otherwise may never have even met.  We all like to chat with our friends and colleagues, and more often than not, these people have similar views and think like us.  The chance to hear an honest opinion from someone who has a completely different outlook on life could be worth its (or their) weight in gold.

As noted above, a comprehensive social media campaign will first, focus on generating business, but with that objective in place, your holistic marketing strategy may also take into account opportunities to enhance engagement with customers and show greater value-added potential in the market place by tapping into the broader range of benefits that social media platforms offer.