With the massive use of social media together with the change in search engine algorythms means that having a social media presence for your business is no longer an option.  Below are some convincing reasons why every small business should be using social media.

Social media marketing increases awareness of your business

“100% of business decision-makers use social media for work purposes,” according to Forrester.  According to businesstocommunity.com “68% of consumers check out companies on social networking sites before buying.”  iMedia says“70% of marketers say that social media content marketing has increased their brand awareness.”

Social media drives new business and increases sales

According to Crowdspring, 50% of small business owners reported the gain of new customers through social media, most notably through Facebook and LinkedIn.  Linked in themselves say that “82% report that it is effective for lead generation.” HubSpot’s State of Inbound Marketing says that, “77% of B2C and 43% of B2B companies say they’ve acquired customers through Facebook.”

Provides credibility for your business

According to a Morpace Omnibus Report, “a huge 68% of Facebook users say a recommendation from a Facebook friend would make them more likely to buy a specific product or visit a certain retailer.”

Your target audience is using it.

Here are the official statistics from Facebook about usage.

• We had 845 million monthly active users at the end of December 2011.
• Approximately 80% of our monthly active users are outside the U.S. and Canada.
• We had 483 million daily active users on average in December 2011.
• We had more than 425 million monthly active users who used Facebook mobile products in December 2011.
• Facebook is available in more than 70 languages

Source: http://newsroom.fb.com/content/default.aspx?NewsAreaId=22

Of course these numbers are for Facebook only and don’t include any of the other social media sites which have hundreds of millions more users.

Google counts social sharing when ranking.

The whole concept of the internet is a web. If you think of a web there are many layers or paths to a single point. The more paths, called links, to this single point the more authoritative, or stronger the point becomes.

When many different people on social media refer to your content, your website, your articles, or your video it means that those individual people find your content useful, entertaining, informative or all of the above. When this happens the search engines pay attention and in return use this as a factor to provide better search engine placement for your content.

Provides great brand exposure

Everybody wants to expose their brand to a larger audience. The more targeted people who are aware of your brand, the greater the chance you have of turning those into leads, paying clients and brand advocates.

It’s the next generation of Word of mouth marketing

The are few better ways to interact with potential clients than via people who have already experienced what your business has to offer.

When your social media presence starts to generate conversation and reactions such as; likes, shares, tweets, pins this social recommendation is visible to that persons individual following and acts as a great method of introducing your brand or business to their friends or family.