Growing an active presence on social media organically, without relying on paid social media advertising, is something that every brand should consider, but it’s not something that you should step into without making a commitment. Social media is a marriage where you commit to your audience to not only show up consistently but also to provide things that will help them.
Most people think that if you create awesome posts on the social media channel of your choice, you’ll grow your audience. It’s very much like a Field of Dreams concept that people think that “if you build it, they will come.” Although it was true for the movie, it couldn’t be farther from the truth for social media. Social media is inherently social. It involves engaging human beings and forming relationships with them. With that said, a majority of social media management involves daily engagement with your target audience. Although tools and processes can help you triage and streamline processes, it’s hard work that cannot be automated.
If your brand is just getting started on social media or if you need to make the case to increase your investment and commitment to grow your organic social media presence, knowing the potential social media benefits of embarking on this journey is critical. Below, we’ve listed some of the many benefits. If you’re familiar with the marketing funnel, we’ve organized these benefits into each stage of a traditional marketing funnel. An important distinction: Depending on your focus and the channel you decide to have a presence on, you can achieve some level of the benefits below. However, some social media channels are generally better than others at accomplishing certain goals, and social media benefits are largely correlated to the maturity of your presence. Generally, the longer you are active on social media, the more opportunities you have to move down the funnel.
Awareness
Increasing brand recognition
Increasing the size of your current target audience
Expanding to include additional target audiences
Improving brand reputation and trust
Improving SEO rankings and searchability
Creating unique channel-specific experiences for your product/content
Sharing your story in an authentic way
Consideration
Participating in conversations that matter to your brand
Being considered a thought leader
Listening to the everyday needs, desires, challenges of your target audience
Gathering product feedback
Driving quality referral traffic to your website
Generating new sales leads
Conversion*
Increasing in-person and virtual event sign-ups
Increasing engagements in back-channel conversations for your events
Increasing conversions (freemium or free trial accounts) and revenue
Propelling email list growth
Increasing brand loyalty by creating a more active user base
Providing a better customer service experience
*Conversions are determined largely by the user experience of your website. Please invest in optimizing the conversion rate of your website.
Loyalty
Creating relationships with influencers, your audience, and your customers
Increasing loyalty and creating more active users
Increasing recurring engagement with virtual or in-person events
Gathering and promoting usage stories for marketing and sales
Advocacy
Identifying, rewarding, and highlighting ambassadors, affiliates, and power users
Increased engagements, referral traffic, conversions, and revenue as a result of your ambassadors, power users, and/or affiliates
Parting Rant
You may look at this funnel and think that social media is all about a linear downward progression, and that’s wrong. The value of your social media presence cannot be judged solely by the revenue it generates. Social media is social! It’s an authentic way for your brand to provide consistent value with your target audience and begin to form a relationship with them. How can you, or more importantly, why would you begin to quantify the value of the relationships you create? Relationships come in a variety of shapes and sizes and can turn into any of the benefits listed above.
Here’s a quick quiz to illustrate this point. Which of these relationships is the most valuable to you?
An influencer routinely posts positively about your product and engages with your posts. They never visit your site, nor are they a customer.
A superuser constantly asks questions about your product through social media when they are troubleshooting issues. They are always delighted and share their delight publicly when you answer their questions in a timely manner on the channel.
After following your posts for months, a prospective customer signs up for a webinar and eventually becomes a customer. One year later, they referred 10 other customers.
It’s important that you don’t get caught up in the old hub-and-spoke way of thinking about social media. Social media does not exist to simply refer traffic to your website. It’s a vibrant place where you can (and should) provide unique, engaging, channel-specific experiences that can provide value and ultimately build trust with your audience.
Your Homework
Once you’ve reviewed and considered the many benefits of organic social media, prioritize which goals you will begin to focus on first. If you are just starting out, focus on the awareness goals. As your presence matures and engagement increases, you can then begin to craft goals that move down the funnel. Once you’ve identified your goals, sign up for our social media metrics boot camp, where you’ll be able to identify which metrics to track and how to track them.
