If you’re running a business, having active social media accounts is not optional for your brand—not when there are over 3 billion people using social media networks worldwide.

Due to social media’s reach and its effective, affordable, and highly targeted advertising and conversational possibilities, you can build your brand, connect with your customers, gain important customer insights, and grow your audience of potential leads. If you’re not taking advantage of this opportunity, your company is missing out on exposure to a massive chunk of the market.

So, how can small businesses dive in and best take advantage of social media channels?

1. Use It to Build Brand Awareness

Considering that nearly half of the world’s population is on some social media platform, it seems like a natural place to start if you’re trying to expand your reach and tap new, targeted prospects. People aren’t just doing quick check-ins on their preferred platform either: Almost half of the 3.7 hours that people spend on their mobile phones daily is spent using social and communication apps. That’s a lot of time that you could take advantage of by providing valuable content to your target audience while introducing your brand and educating them about your product or service.

2. Use Social Media to Humanize Your Brand

Building customer awareness is just one part of the social media marketing equation. A big part of ensuring high engagement and building customer loyalty is giving your brand a human face that’s relatable to your audience. This requires your business to connect with customers and prospects—by showing them your brand’s personality through interactions with real people at your company.

Social media is a great platform to share your brand values and demonstrate how you live up to these. Through social media, you can connect with your audience by engaging with them in the comment section, inviting them to ask questions that you can answer, or informing them of new products, services, and programs.

3. Use Social Media to Stay Top of Mind

Since your potential customers are on social media so much, staying top of mind is easy when you have a solid social media presence. Every time your audience logs in to check their social media accounts you have an opportunity to present something relevant and valuable that will ensure your brand builds and maintains visibility. So, consistently post new material to your pages, keep it interesting, and make sure audiences can look forward to seeing and reading everything you post.

4. Use Social Media to Boost Website Traffic

Social media posts are great ways to drive traffic to your website. Whenever you share content from your blog or a product post from your shop pages on social media platforms, you create a direct link for your followers to go to your website and explore further. This is a great way to drive more people to your website in order to showcase your product or service better.

5. Use Social Media to Get to Know Your Audience Better

Social media is a great platform for gathering important insights about your audience. Who are your followers? What are their interests? What posts do they interact with most? What products get the most engagement? Insights generated by different social media platforms can help you easily answer these questions and communicate and engage with prospects better.

Hope my answer helps! If you have more questions, feel free to continue this conversation on our Twitter or LinkedIn, or simply leave a comment below.