Research suggests the average American spends nearly 116 minutes a day on social media every day. During this time, hundreds of brand impressions are made, and many users spend at least a few minutes researching businesses.

Is your company receiving the same attention?

If not, it might be time to review the many reasons social media matters when it comes to improving your business outlook. Exposure. Perhaps the greatest benefit to having a solid social media strategy in place is the ability to gain increased online exposure almost instantly. By staying active on social media, your brand becomes visible to thousands of new leads on a daily basis. Viral capability. One post, one meme, one video.

What these have in common is the ability to go viral thanks to social media and its knack for reaching millions. One viral post could equate to hundreds of new customers. Cultivate client relationships. Businesses have been using social media to make a deeper connection with existing clients. The result has been enhanced customer relationships, improved customer service, and increased brand loyalty.

Improved SERP ranking. A strong social media presence influences your search engine rankings more than you might think. For determining the website rankings top search engines like Google and bing use the social impressions (from Social media) Diversifying Your Social Media Strategy To produce the best results from a social media strategy, diversification is essential. Heres a breakdown of the most popular social media platforms and how your business can benefit from using them. Twitter.

Used by brands primarily to engage with customers in real time, Twitters social platform helps companies gain authority in an industry, increase exposure, and disseminate brand-centered information. Facebook. Facebook tops the social media list with over a billion users. While various changes to Facebook have made it difficult for companies to increase organic views, the broad scope, the ability to improve leadership and high interaction levels of the platform are important for enterprises. LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is considered to be the most qualified social media platform in all fields, and is best used to launch a company or CEO presence. Staying active in LinkedIn shows the firm's dedication to professionalism and offers a range of incentives for strategic leadership in your business. YouTube. Humans respond to visual content more than any other form. Needless to say, Google-owned YouTube is used to publish more than 100 hours of content per minute.

Creating an active, branded YouTube presence can boost the success of your digital marketing campaigns while reaching an international audience.