If you haven’t been fully leveraging social media to grow your small business, then it’s time to stop living in 2010 and join everyone else in 2019. Standing out from the crowd in your industry has required more than simply having a nice website and ranking well on the major search engines for many years now.

Younger potential customers, especially, wonder what’s wrong with a business that doesn’t have any presence on the most major social media platforms. Below is a list of a few simple tips and benefits for utilizing these platforms by going where your customers are.

Determine the Best Platforms for Your Business

There are over 50 social media platforms on the internet today. That being said, a few of the most popular ones, especially being used by businesses to promote themselves, include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and YouTube. Facebook is, of course, the king of the pack with a nearly ludicrous 2.5 billion monthly active users as of the fourth quarter of 2019. If you don’t at least have an account there, you are missing out on a potentially insane amount of traffic that could be coming your way.

Platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram will have a higher proportion of younger users. If you have a business that sells products predominantly to such an audience, then actively engaging their users can reap tremendous benefits for you.

Use Social Media to Multiply Your Advertising Outreach

Let’s say you’ve come up with a very well-written article about a new product your company just released. You put it up on your website, and now anyone who clicks through to your site from organic search listings or any paid search ads you have will run across it.

Now, let’s multiply the above scenario. Once you’ve created Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram accounts, you can also effortlessly upload the article or blog post to all of these platforms. This provides many more opportunities for someone to run across this information than when it’s only on your website’s blog page. Then think about this being done many times over for all of the interesting articles you have about your company, products or services.

Use Social Media to Create Loyal Customers

One of the great aspects of social media is how interactive it is. It’s important to attract members to your FaceBook group, followers to your Twitter account and subscribers to your YouTube channel. This helps you establish a connection with prospects and customers.

Once you have them subscribed, following you or in your group, this makes it easier to turn them into repeat customers since they’re sure to see some of your blog posts, videos and tweets on a recurring basis.

Unleash the Power of Social Media Analytics Software

There are tools available that can give you valuable insights into your customers across social media platforms. Social media analytics software and services such as Keyhole, AgoraPulse and Brandwatch, just to name a few, can tell you when your social media followers are most active, so you know what days and times to hit them with your sales message.

These types of tools can also determine which content of yours is most effective and analyze and categorize valuable information about your prospects and customers.

Being Active on Social Media Can Get You More Website Traffic

As good as social media is by itself, its biggest use can still be as yet another way to get people to your website. A well-designed website that both looks and performs beautifully and has content that converts visitors into customers should be at the core of all your other digital outreach efforts. Along this line of thinking, getting people’s attention through accounts on social media platforms can simply be seen as a complement to organic and paid search listings to get people to your website.

Depending on the specific platform, social media sites can have all sorts of distracting ads and trending news on the side or bottom of pages where a prospect is ostensibly trying to learn more about your products or company. Getting them to your website means getting them to a place on the internet where the information they see is totally under your control, which can only increase conversion rates.