Influencer Marketing in Asia: An Interview with Aaron Brooks
Aaron Brooks
April 21, 2017
Social media allows people to discover your business. It’s that simple. If you’re on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or TikTok, you can create content that captures people’s attention, sells your brand, and brings them into your business. All you need is smart marketing, clever content, and dedicated time spent on social media.
Want a quick, bite-sized list of the 10 biggest benefits of social media for your business? This is it, right here:
Social media is a tool that can really help you build your brand and your business. Without it, you’ll lose out on connections with a vast marketplace that can potentially give you new customers, help you form deeper relationships with existing customers, and get your brand onto a global stage.
Social media for a business is a slightly different animal than social media for personal use. You need to use it carefully so you don’t compromise your brand identity or reputation.
This is when it’s a good idea to have a trusted support system in place and to use people who understand the nuances of social media so that you can avoid unnecessary mistakes.
You want your Instagram, your TikTok, and your overall social media strategy to align properly so that every social interaction is designed to meet your business goals.
It’s expected that the number of people using social media will increase to nearly six billion by 2027 and even today that number is around 4.89 billion. These are the people that your business wants to reach with social media and they are also the reason why one of the biggest benefits of social media is increasing brand awareness.
Instagram’s own research found that 90% of people follow at least one business and that it’s the leading platform for building relationships with brands. Facebook is also a powerhouse, with one billion users messaging a business every week and 53% more people likely to buy if they can message a business directly. Then there’s TikTok, which is currently the leading app for consumer spend and is considered one of the most effective platforms for achieving marketing objectives.
Another mega benefit of social media for business is its ability to help you generate leads. You don’t need a huge budget to see this benefit. This is because the social media platforms have made it very easy for you to collect leads using their easy advertising tools [link to our Facebook ads post] that help you to learn everything you need to know about your customers. An even bigger advantage is that social media advertising is a lot cheaper than traditional digital advertising and can deliver extraordinary results.
Thanks to the variety of ways you can communicate with your target market, you can really engage with your customers through social media. Think ads that are customised to talk to your users, call-to-action buttons that encourage people to find out more, content that inspires and connects with your customers, and buttons that allow people to book appointments, send emails, or purchase goods.
When you create inspiring and interesting content that sells what people want to buy, social media adds that layer of immediacy to interactions that really shapes customer engagement. People can buy items right now. They can talk to you, right now. And they can find out more, right now. It’s a huge benefit for businesses.
You’ve got the leads from your smart social media campaigns, now you want to convert them so you can build your business. Using the same CTAs, buttons, content, and ads that have already helped you capture customer attention, you can convert this attention into sales.
There are a lot of different tools designed to help you manage your leads and conversions on social media. In this Vamp post, we unpack the best of the free and paid-for social media tools that can help you really squeeze out the benefits of social media for your business.
If you have sparkling content and a solid strategy, and your investment into building your brand on social media is consistent, then you’ll benefit from customer retention. If your content connects with people on a personal level, if it resonates with them and is authentic in terms of your brand, and if you are proactive on social media, then you’ll build trust and loyalty with your customers.
When you create loyalty through rich social interaction and marketing, then you get the benefit of customer retention that translates into more business, long-standing customer spend, and a trusted brand identity. And these benefits are invaluable.
Brand awareness and brand building are often seen as the same thing, but there is one subtle and important difference – brand awareness is your visibility on the market; brand building is how you build your brand’s identity and ethos within the perceptions of the market. Social media is a superb tool for enhancing both, but it really can be magical when it comes to connecting with your customers.
You can open up discussions, connect on a personal level, set up surveys and polls, and even curate content in collaboration with customers or influencers so you can build relationships and your brand.
Social media helps you to communicate with your audience. It’s as simple and as complicated as that.
You can, as mentioned earlier, use it to talk directly to customers and build relationships with them. You can use it to create ad campaigns with CTAs that lead people to direct communication and information sharing. And you can expand on this to explore new ways of communicating your brand messages and ethos to a wider market.
There are few tools as globally and geographically dispersed as social media, so perhaps its most staggeringly impressive benefit for your business is that it allows you to authentically communicate with anyone, anywhere, any when.
It’s worth getting to grips with the different types of content you can use with your social media marketing campaigns or on your social media platforms. Whether you’re engaging with customers with fresh ideas, short-form inspiration, or sales and product guides, each type of content gives you the chance to really connect with people and build your brand. This type of content can even be turned into ads that then generate even more traction with wider reach and engagement.
Social media provides you with quantifiable insights that come hand in hand with social media advertising tools and capabilities. All the platforms have insights and analytics that you can use to shape your content, your strategies, and your planning.
You can use these to find out who’s reading your ads and content, to discover new markets and opportunities, and even to find out the best times to post your content so you’re talking to exactly the right people.
Social media advertising and social media insights offer you a playground of information that you can use to transform how you communicate, how you build your brand, and how effectively you stay ahead of the trends.
Insights are invaluable as they also give you the added benefit of recognising opportunities or perhaps tweaking campaigns to become more effective.
Social media has a wide spread of benefits that any business can use. You can customise how you use social media to achieve specific goals, to refine your strategies, and to build sustainable brand foundations.
Choosing the right social media platform depends heavily on understanding your audience and the type of content you plan to share. Each platform attracts different demographics and content types. For example, TikTok is ideal for businesses targeting Gen Z and those who prefer video-first marketing, while LinkedIn serves professionals and B2B audiences.
Instagram is strong for visual brands, and Facebook is better for broader demographics. Start by analysing your audience’s preferences and match them to the platform where they are most active. Business goals also influence the decision. If the goal is customer engagement, interactive platforms like Instagram or Facebook might be best. For direct sales, platforms with built-in shopping features, such as Instagram and TikTok, provide the tools needed to connect and convert. Always align your social media choice with your broader marketing objectives, considering both your audience’s habits and your business goals.
Maintaining brand consistency across platforms can be challenging, but it is essential for building brand recognition and trust. The key is to ensure your visual identity and messaging are uniform, no matter where your audience interacts with your business. Use consistent fonts, logos, colours, and design elements across all your profiles. For messaging, develop a brand voice and tone guide that can be applied to all communications, whether you’re posting a short tweet or a long-form LinkedIn article.
Tools like social media management platforms (Hootsuite, Buffer, etc.) can help schedule and automate posts, ensuring content is timed and aligned with broader marketing campaigns. Additionally, creating adaptable content for different formats—such as a video that can be trimmed for Instagram stories but also posted in full on Facebook—allows you to maintain consistency while adapting to each platform’s unique content style.
For small businesses, social media marketing can feel overwhelming, but it’s possible to achieve impact without overextending resources. Start by focusing on one or two platforms that align best with your target audience and goals, rather than spreading your efforts too thin across multiple networks. Creating a content plan that prioritises quality over quantity helps ensure posts are valuable and engaging.
Small businesses can maximise their reach by repurposing content—transforming a blog post into multiple social media posts, turning a customer testimonial into an Instagram story, or turning FAQs into an explainer video. Outsourcing certain tasks to freelancers or agencies can also help if resources for content creation are limited. Automation tools for scheduling posts, analytics, and content curation can streamline the process and save time. Finally, engage with your audience authentically, as direct interaction builds loyalty and can provide organic growth, which is vital for small businesses looking to get the most from their social efforts.
Discover how Vamp can help you really explore the benefits of social media for your business and how you can turn content into customers.
