1. Find the social network that suits your needs.

When deciding what social network to pour your precious time into, its always good have a look at the demographics of the people using any social network you’re thinking of using to promote your target audience. For example if you’re a fashion retailer and want to target, women then maybe Pinterest’s right for you, as one of their largest demographics is women who are interested in fashion, so maybe this is the right platform for you. However if you have created a mobile phone game and you want to target men in their early 20’s, then you many want to try Facebook’s highly targeted advertising system. If you’re a university that wants to target under 18’s then maybe you should try Snapchat.

2. Allows you to interact with your customers.

Social media allows for instant interaction between customer and company, this gives you the ability to gain the trust of its customer base and build up a rapport with those who use your products. This also allows for instant feedback on products,allowing you to decide the direction you want to steer your company, for example a baker may try out a new bread recipe and positive or negative feedback on social media can then help them decide whether or not to continue with the recipe.

3. You can share content easier and faster.

With social media content can be shared easier and faster than ever before and can be posted for people to see instantly. This means you no longer have to wait and hope people come to your website to see content, instead you can put it out and people will be visible to all of your followers instantly.

4. A low cost way of increasing brand awareness

Social media can be used quite effectively to increase brand awareness, without the need to spend any money, provided that you have time to post content and interact with your customers. However some companies also find that it’s more efficient to outsource their social media leaving them with more time to run the rest of the business.

5 . Find out who’s interested in your product.

Using social media can really help a business engage with and find audiences. You can use tools such as twitter analytics, facebook insights and hootsuite. These tools will allow you to see who’s engaging with you on social media platforms. If you have a target demographic for you product analytics will help you to see if you are meeting this goal, if you’re not, maybe you need to reconsider what content you put out and who your target audience is.