The Importance of Social Media Engagement to Startup Businesses
If your startup business involves handicrafts, you might have been looking into any of the several Etsy alternatives that exist at the moment, especially after hearing the news about the said e-commerce site raising the fees it charges to sellers like you from 3.5 to 5 percent.
But regardless of where you end up selling your products or even if your startup doesn’t sell any handicrafts at all, you’ll want to actively engage in social media where most of your potential and existing customers are.
Just how important is social media engagement to startup businesses like yours?
- It can present your startup business as approachable.
You may have already opened a social media account for your startup business and created contents, but if you aren’t replying to comments or direct messages sent regarding to any of your posts, they might perceive you as a snob instead and decide not to do business with you.
So, when you open a business page on social media, always find time to reply to what people have to say about your content regardless if it is positive or negative. That way, people would see your startup business as approachable. Avoid using canned responses as you wouldn’t want to sound impersonal at all.
However, if you can’t squeeze in some time to respond to all comments and messages in your business’s social media account, you can consider hiring and train someone to answer them for you.
- It can help you more easily convert people into your customers.
Users of social media might stumble upon your startup and check if you have any interesting posts that can make them want to buy anything that you offer. A 2014 study confirmed that most people check a business’s Facebook page first – especially if it has mostly positive reviews and a high rating – before purchasing anything from it.
So whether you’ve set up a social media account for your startup business on Facebook or some other platform, you’ll want to craft content that people can comment on and share on their profiles. Contents has to be relevant to their needs and can bring additional value aside from being attention-grabbing and entertaining enough to increase your chances of converting them into your startup’s customers.
- It can teach you how your startup can improve to serve your customers’ needs.
Even if you’re aware of some changes to your business, feedback received by its social media account matters as well. You’ll want to have fresh pairs of eyes who can see any mistakes that your business has committed, but you’ve overlooked for whatever reason.
You’ll also want to solicit any suggestions from your customers as to how you can serve their needs better so that they’ll buy from you again and again without having to look anywhere else. Just make sure to address only feedback and suggestions coming from legitimate social media users. Check their profiles first to see whether they’re real or not.
- Social media engagement can increase the visibility of your startup business.
All major social media platforms currently use an algorithm wherein posts with the most number of interactions show in a user’s news feed more than those that don’t have as many likes, comments, and shares.
Again, you’ll need to create remarkable contents so that the social media platform you decided to use would always include your startup in its built-in algorithm of displaying posts.
Conclusion
According to a 2018 survey, 71 percent of all small businesses use social media. So if your startup isn’t using it yet, you should start opening an account on both your potential and existing customers are most likely using.
Once you’ve done that, you’ll then have to interact with them as the importance of doing so had been shown above. Your startup business is in the digital age after all, whether you like it or not, you can’t afford to neglect using social media and engage people.