For a business to grow rapidly, it must reach a large audience quickly. Without a strong social media presence, your business is likely to struggle. Research indicates that almost 2 out of 3 adults use social media. If you don’t take advantage of social media, marketing to potential leads and customers becomes much more difficult.

Here are 6 ways in which social media marketing can benefit a business.

Social Media Gives You a Wider Reach

With social media, it’s easy to market your services to a large population. And not only does social media allow you to reach out to more people; it even lets you determine the kind of audience to whom you wish to market yourself.

Using Social Media for Business Boosts Your Site’s SEO

Search engine crawlers can tell which pages get regular traffic and which ones are overlooked and neglected. A strong content strategy for SEO is key to achieving high rankings in search engines, but boosting traffic to your optimized pages will help them rise more quickly in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Social Media Marketing Is Easily Sharable Marketing

A user can easily share any marketing activity or advertisement that’s posted up on a social media website.

This means that once you’ve shared a post, people will eventually ensure that it gets to your target market; the people who will actually benefit from your business.

A Strong Social Media Presence Builds Brand Loyalty

A report published by Texas Tech University found that brands with active social media profiles have more loyal customers. It’s easy to imagine why: when you’re engaging and interacting on social media (not just tossing your posts out onto the web hoping someone will stumble upon them) you become less like a corporation and more like what you truly are, a unified group of people who share a vision.

Social Media Gives You the Ability to Quickly Respond to Customers

Once you’ve shared any content on social media, it’s easy to keep track of customer responses and feedback given by social media users.

Besides making the necessary changes as soon as possible, you can even respond to your customer’s queries and messages. This will help you engage with the audience better so they keep coming back for more.

Customers You Didn’t Know Existed Will Find (and buy from) you

In the process of marketing with Facebook, you’ll probably join a ton of groups related to your products, industry and customer base. By posting links in these groups, you’ll help influence customers to check out your site. Answering questions on Quora is another option.

These are just a few ways in which companies can use social media. Without a strong social media presence, it’s impossible to survive in today’s market.