The Importance of Social Media in Business

a) The Necessity and Appeal of Using Social Media in Business

1. Nowadays, presence on social media has become a necessity. As a business owner, you can utilize different methods, so your audience can really follow what you do. You may advance this process using ambient advertising. However, using social media is an effective method because the tools available in these platforms are appealing for everybody and people constantly use them.

2. The main appeal about social media is not the number of users in these platforms. There are numerous websites and other media with a plethora of viewers. The appeal about these networks comes in two aspects: 9 Ongoing engagement of audience (power of engagement) The main reason people turn to social media is the power of these networks in engaging the audience. There is no other tool or medium with such power

For instance, consider television that has had many audiences all over the world for years, but it's a one-way medium. The audience can only reach out their messages to TV programs via live call or sending SMS, and such communication is quite limited, but in some social media platforms, thousands of people are commenting and having live discussions and talks from all around the world in real-time.

Easy to use and interact with In addition, using social media is extremely easy and the audience (customer) is prepared to join you. For example, many people still have difficulty sending emails and don’t have any email address but use various social media platforms with no trouble.

b) The Purpose of a Business's Presence on Social Media

Presence on social media is necessary but not sufficient.

You need to define a goal for your presence on social media. If you don’t define a goal, you are unable to analyze your activity. Analysis is always conduced based on goals. In marketing strategies, two main goals are usually pursued: ¾ Sale ¾ Branding

But you need to examine and determine the goals of your presence on social media from other points of view, as well: ƒ Do you intend to attract more followers? ƒ Do you intend to have more interactions with the audience? ƒ Is it your goal to have more attendants in your events? ƒ Is it your goal to increase the number of viewers on your business website?

Define the goals of your presence on social media and evaluate the result according to these goals.

If the goal of your presence on social media is to sell products, use tools that direct the audience to sale implicitly or explicitly. For example, you can get interesting tools by selecting the option "Add a Button" on Facebook. You can increase your sale by offering coupons, discounts, direct link to sale, last status on the market, cut-rate sale, and so on among posted contents on social media.

Try and pursue more than one goals and make plans to achieve them.

c) The Importance of Strategy for Presence on Social Media

As you write the general plans and necessary strategies in your business plan, write your business's marketing plans and strategies in your marketing plan. Such as the case with any other business activity, you need to have a formulated strategy for marketing and presence on social media and design certain plans to achieve the marketing goals.

1.The social media strategy has its special place in the marketing plan. This section is mostly placed under the topic of online marketing, and sometimes, a whole separate topic is basically considered for it. This is due to the great importance of social media.

2.Formulate the strategy for the presence of your business on social media based on the general plan of your company and make plans for the details of your operational plan. This must include the following items:

z Content providing

z Advertising style

z Method of notification regarding incentives