Social media is the bridge that links modern businesses to audiences, connecting offerings with consumer wants and needs. A well-constructed social media marketing strategy results in a smooth, constant flow of leads and customers, while a neglected bridge may fall apart, leading to lost connections and isolation.
Whether through organic content or targeted ads, the impact of social media on business can be dramatic. From more meaningful conversations to significantly more sales, social media can help companies thrive. However, businesses must develop a clear strategy to tap into these benefits effectively and avoid potential pitfalls.
In this article, we'll explore the positive and negative impact of social media on business, with insights from industry experts that will give you the tools to fortify that bridge.
Table of Contents
10 positive impacts of social media on businesses
1. Drive sales through strategic partnerships and community
2. Cultivate brand communities
3. Enhance employee branding
4. Help launch new products
5. Showcase your brand's personality
6. Humanize your brand
7. Find talent
8. Fuel competitor research and consumer insights
9. Enhance customer care
10. Improve targeting across the business
7 negative impacts of social media on businesses
1. Difficult attribution
2. Platform changes drive higher marketing costs
3. Public relations crises and damage to brand reputation
4. Negative engagement
5. Privacy and security issues
6. Demand for instant customer support replies
7. Social media data overload
10 positive impacts of social media on businesses
Drive sales through strategic partnerships and community
Social media's impact on revenue goes far beyond the traditional use of organic and paid strategies. When you align sales teams with social initiatives, you can drive tangible business outcomes.
Lena Weber-Reed, UK Marketing & Communications Manager at Getronics, highlights the often-overlooked power of social selling and employee advocacy programs, explaining how a coordinated effort between social media and sales can build strong relationships with prospects and customers.
This type of partnership ensures a seamless transition from social interactions to direct sales opportunities — a win-win for customers and businesses.
The story of Manny's Deli, shared by Scott Emalfarb, Founder and CEO of Fresh Content Society, further illustrates the immense potential of social media to drive sales.
This is a great example of the power of an engaged social media community to help businesses survive even in crisis moments.
Jacqui Morgan, Global Social Lead at Palo Alto Networks, adds that social media is critical in lower funnel actions, especially in B2B marketing.
The result was a significant improvement in conversion rates, including a whopping 171% higher form fill rate after the LinkedIn Live event and 44% lower cost per lead (CPL) for ads served to users with prior organic exposure.
Social media is not just about visibility but also about creating opportunities to close deals. Follow the best practices below to reap similar benefits.
Best practices for driving sales through social media
- Develop a social selling strategy. Encourage your sales team to engage directly with prospects through social media platforms, integrating product knowledge into conversations.
- Create aligned content. Ensure the social media team focuses on relationship-building and compelling content while the sales team targets customer pain points.
- Measure relevant metrics. Track social media KPIs that matter for both the social and sales teams, such as engagement rates and conversion points. Platforms such as Socialinsider provide advanced social media analytics and reports so you can draw specific insights that support different roles.
- Nurture a social media community. While not directly related to sales, building and maintaining an active, loyal community will create a long-term support system for your brand and showcase brand value to potential partners.
- Use genuine, heartfelt communication. Authentic and meaningful content can resonate more deeply with audiences and generate emotional connections that lead to action.
- Leverage social media for lower funnel conversions. Use social-first content to prime prospects for decision-making and integrate live events or influencer campaigns to close deals.
Cultivate brand communities
We've already seen above how a community can be a lifeline for businesses in times of need. Let's see how to nurture that strong brand community.
Kendall Dickieson, Founder of Flexible Creative, emphasizes that while many businesses view social media as simply a sales channel, its real value lies in its ability to foster meaningful connections with customers.
Brands can tap into customer loyalty and long-term engagement by engaging authentically and creating spaces for community involvement.
Kendall's work with Graza, for example, highlights how the strategic use of organic social media and partnerships with influencers like Molly Baz helped build a passionate community even before the brand launched, leading to sold-out products and partnerships with major retailers like Whole Foods.
Lauren Nicole Jordan, Head of Social Media at LimeLife by Alcone, stresses the importance of prioritizing community and content creation over paid media.
Lauren advocates for investing in organic social first, which leads to more sustainable, long-term growth. She gives an example that shows how community building helps brands reduce their dependence on paid ads and achieve ongoing results.
Jasmine Gilbert from StrategiQ and Venessa Santiago from Well Go USA Entertainment further illustrate the value of social media communities.
Jasmine shares how a fitness brand's social media refresh led to a significant increase in community interaction, with organic social media reach skyrocketing from 1.8k to 19k monthly.
Venessa, on the other hand, explains how fostering relationships with influencers and creating engaging content grew Well Go USA Entertainment's reach and engagement, establishing social media as a primary source of discovery for their audience.
If social media strategy is the bridge, communities are its pillars that have the power to drive engagement, build trust, and even impact sales. The examples above prove that brands must view social media not just as a megaphone but as a space for relationship-building.
Best practices for building a brand community on social media
- Incentivize your community. Reward your most active and loyal followers, whether through special offers, recognition, or ambassador programs, to strengthen the connection.
- Activate your superfans. Leverage your most loyal customers to create ambassadors who can help spread the word and drive brand awareness.
- Stay involved beyond your own accounts. As Kendall Dickieson observes, "Outbound community management is still also underrated in the brand space." Engage with other communities, creators, and content beyond your brand pages to bring new followers and energy to your platforms.
- Partner with influencers. Collaborate with creators who resonate with your brand and can authentically connect with your target audience. Use partnerships to expand your community by leaning into other established groups.
- Use social media analysis to track results and refine your approach.
Speaking of a successful campaign she ran, Lauren explains:
- Leverage social proof. Encourage your community to create user-generated content featuring your products, tagging your brand, and sharing their posts on social media. This will generate organic buzz and demonstrate loyalty.
Enhance employee branding
Employer branding through social media helps companies strengthen their online presence, attract top talent, and nurture a stronger sense of community internally.
Bozhena Sheremeta, Product Marketing Manager at Embrace Software for Educators, shares how empowering employees to contribute to social media content can significantly enhance brand perception and recruitment efforts.
At one of her former B2B clients, the company's social media strategy initially centered around sharing standard corporate updates. However, after introducing authentic employee-driven content — including videos where team members shared professional insights — the impact on both engagement and brand visibility was substantial.
Additionally, she highlights how involving employees as content creators organically improved the company's HR efforts. Without any paid job ads, they saw an influx of job candidates.
Through employee interaction, companies humanize their brand and create a more authentic image. Moreover, employee-driven content helps build a sense of pride and ownership among the team, generation engagement both on the job and on social media.
Best practices for employee branding on social media
- Make employee branding easy. Leverage dedicated tools and create communication channels that provide employees with the content and instructions necessary to actively promote your brand on social media.
- Create a content creation incentive program. Encourage employees to actively contribute to social media by providing fun and valuable rewards, such as public recognition, gift cards, paid time off, development opportunities, or team-building activities.
- Showcase the company culture. Use social media to promote your company's values and internal achievements. Celebrate your team's wins publicly and share behind-the-scenes content.
- Listen to employee feedback. Actively seek feedback from your team on how to represent the company better. Involve them in shaping the social media content strategy and listen to their suggestions for improvement.
- Measure engagement metrics. Track the performance of employee-generated content and use social media metrics to continuously improve. Be transparent about results to show employees the impact of their actions.
Help launch new products
Social media platforms not only allow brands to introduce new products to a wider audience but also enable them to gather valuable feedback and make improvements.
What makes social media so effective in product launches is its ability to engage audiences in real time and generate UGC.
Fatima Baig, Founder of The Éclat Agency, highlights how a modest social media campaign for a new chocolate launch exceeded expectations, impacting sales and driving brand visibility and long-term customer engagement.
A mix of organic and paid social media strategies resulted in a 50% increase in boutique foot traffic, a 34% boost in web sales (even for unrelated products), and 2.2K new followers within just two weeks. The campaign's success continued to show during the holiday season, when the products sold out even before promotions began, demonstrating the lasting impact of social media on brand performance.
Fatima concludes:
Another powerful example of social media's influence comes from Sheeza Anjum, Social Media Strategist at Havas People, who highlights KFC's innovative approach to launching a new product by leaning into customer feedback.
KFC used criticism about their old fries as a way to introduce a new recipe on Twitter. This bold strategy gained the brand an impressive 66,000 new customers, proving that social media can turn even negative sentiment into an opportunity for growth.
Best practices for using social media to launch or evolve products
- Encourage UGC. Get your customers involved in the product launch by encouraging them to share their experiences and content. Think of ways to incentivize social media activity, such as offering exclusive previews and early access to new products.
- Make the best out of real-time engagement. Connect with your audience in real time, build anticipation, answer questions, and provide updates.
- Be bold. Don't shy away from taking risks in your product launch strategy. As KFC demonstrated, even negative feedback can be spun into a marketing win.
- Leverage customer feedback. Use both positive and negative feedback to shape the messaging around new products and inform your product development teams about what works and what needs improvement.
- Create a ripple effect. Design campaigns that aim not only at immediate sales but also at generating long-term brand visibility and customer loyalty.
Showcase your brand's personality
Audiences want authenticity. In a sea of clichés and dull content, brands have the chance to use social media platforms to stand out.
Nicole Simões, Brand & Content Manager at Eleven Eleven, emphasizes that social media has evolved into a comprehensive, all-encompassing solution.
Social media goes beyond simple brand updates, becoming a strategic platform across various departments — from customer support to sales and product development.
Nicole presents the case of Fastjet, an African airline that used social media to revolutionize its operations. Through strategic social media campaigns, Fastjet increased customer support response times from 40% over five days to 100% within an hour, while also boosting sales by 40% in just a year.
The brand's social media efforts helped grow its Instagram following from 30,000 to 200,000, and its Facebook presence expanded to 1 million followers, becoming the second-largest among African airlines.
Moreover, by showcasing their company culture online, Fastjet improved talent acquisition by 30%, positioning themselves as an employer of choice in the region.
Even in terms of competitor analysis and product development, the insights gathered from social media allowed the brand to expand its network strategically, solidifying its place as a dominant player in the Pan-African market.
Best practices for expressing brand vision and mission on social media
- Align content with core values. Populate your social media content calendar with posts that aren't just trendy and fun but reflect your brand's vision and mission.
- Engage authentically with your audience. Be present. Respond to comments, messages, and mentions in real time to showcase an active and caring brand personality.
- Use storytelling. Leverage different formats — compelling text, striking visuals, and captivating videos — to tell your brand's story and create an emotional connection with your audience.
- Monitor social sentiment. Regularly analyze social media insights to understand how your vision and mission are perceived and adjust your strategy as needed.
- Collaborate with relevant influencers. Partner with creators who share your values to amplify your brand's message and reach a broader audience.
Humanize your brand
Think back to the bridge we mentioned in the beginning. It can be purely functional (and boring), connecting two sides of a river. It can also be both functional and beautiful, like the Brooklyn Bridge in New York and the Tower Bridge in London, which have become worthwhile attractions for people's eyes and cameras.
Similarly, social media is a tool for communication, but it can also be a powerful means to attract audiences and create meaningful connections with them.
As Jacqui Morgan, Global Social Lead at Palo Alto Networks, highlights, by sharing relatable and fun content, brands can nurture relationships that lead to tangible business outcomes.
Whether through videos of executives engaging with popular social media trends or showcasing lighter, more personal sides of the company, these efforts humanize the brand and open up meaningful customer conversations.
After implementing this approach at Palo Alto Networks, Jacqui has seen not only the personal followings of company leaders grow but also more active, engaged conversations with customers.
Best practices for humanizing your brand on social media
- Showcase people's personalities. Share content that highlights the human side of executives and other team members, such as behind-the-scenes moments or participation in viral challenges.
- Keep track of trends and participate. Follow hashtags and content themes that align with your brand's values and identity and find opportunities to contribute to ongoing conversations.
- Be relatable. Create fun, informal content that resonates with your audience, breaking down the formality often associated with corporate talk.
- Tell personal stories. Feature posts about your employees, customers, achievements, and failures to humanize your brand and build emotional connections.
- Be engaging. Interact with your audience in a genuine, conversational way by asking questions and responding to comments and feedback.
- Use humor and creativity. When appropriate, don't be afraid to have a more light-hearted tone for more genuine communication.
Find talent
We've already given a couple of examples that show the impact of social media on recruitment. It's worth emphasizing again, as social channels have completely transformed recruitment.
Not only can businesses reach potential employees more efficiently, but they can build employer identities that positively contribute to the overall brand image and reach.
Shahveer Imran, Social Media Marketing Specialist with North American Staffing Services, has witnessed firsthand how platforms like LinkedIn and Meta (Facebook and Instagram) have become essential tools in modern recruitment. These platforms offer access to a broader talent pool and provide the tools to engage passive candidates (individuals not actively searching for jobs but open to new opportunities).
On Meta, demographic and interest-based targeting tools help recruiters find talent that might be missed using traditional methods, such as job boards or agency databases.
"Social media has also become a goldmine for competitor research," Shahveer observes. Regularly monitoring competitor job posts, engagement levels, and employer branding strategies gives companies valuable insights into market trends and what's working for other organizations.
Competitor analysis "has enabled us to pivot faster to emerging trends, like emphasizing flexible work arrangements or offering employee perks that we noticed were gaining traction among competitors," he adds.
Shahveer shares a great example of the power of social media competitive analysis.
Best practices for smart social media recruitment
- Optimize job posts. Monitor hashtags and use relevant keywords to increase visibility to the right candidates.
- Showcase your culture and values. Don't only communicate when you're actively seeking candidates but include employer branding posts in your overall social media marketing strategy.
- Engage passive candidates. LinkedIn and Instagram are great to reach people who aren't actively searching but are open to new opportunities.
- Target local communities with Meta. Meta's rich demographic tools can help you engage specific local audiences for roles in niche markets or geographic locations.
- Leverage paid campaigns. If you need to fill a role quickly, invest in paid social campaigns to take advantage of advanced targeting options and to boost your job posts to qualified candidates.
- Monitor competitor strategies. Track competitors' engagement on social media to understand what's resonating with job seekers and adjust your strategies accordingly.
Fuel competitor research and consumer insights
Competitive research helps businesses make informed decisions, identify opportunities for growth and partnerships, and mitigate potential risks. And social media is a treasure trove of competitor insights.
Corina Bordeianu, Senior Social Media Manager at Booking.com, highlights the importance of competitor research and staying attuned to emerging trends, particularly on platforms like TikTok.
Through social listening, you can track how competitors interact with customers and what content resonates most with audiences. This data allows you to stay ahead of industry trends and craft relatable, engaging content — that doesn't feel outdated but fresh and relevant.
Best practices for social media competitive research
- Get real-time feedback through social listening. Monitor conversations around your brand and competitors regularly to spot trends and customer sentiment.
- Benchmark competitor performance. Use tools like Socialinsider to compare cross-channel data and see how your social efforts stack up.
- Monitor competitors' social media growth. Track important KPIs, such as the follower growth and content engagement of your competitors over time, to uncover winning strategies and identify content gaps.
- Leverage sentiment analysis. Socialinsider's sentiment analysis feature allows you to track how your audience feels about your brand and competitors over time, giving you a clear picture of public perception and the possibility to manage any reputational risks proactively.
Enhance customer care
As people increasingly expect brands to be present everywhere, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X become important tools for managing and improving customer support.
Oksana Danshyna, Director of PR, Communications & Social Media at DigitalOcean, emphasizes the importance of social listening for improving customer care.
In her experience, feedback shared on social media often surpasses what is provided in traditional customer surveys, as users tend to be more open and vocal about their experiences online.
Here’s an example from X, where DigitalOcean has successfully used the tactics above to increase organic engagement and foster deeper connections with their community, improving customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Integrating polls, open-ended questions, and direct feedback into their social media strategy helps companies grasp their audience's key concerns.
Best practices for enhancing customer care through social media
- Leverage technology for social listening. Use social media listening tools to track mentions in real time. This allows your team to address issues and fine-tune your customer service approach proactively.
- React quickly to customer inquiries to build trust and manage reputational risk. According to McKinsey, most consumers (79%) expect brands to respond to social media inquiries within 24 hours, while nearly half (40%) anticipate a response within the first hour.
- Create interactive content. Use polls, open-ended questions, and direct messaging to spark meaningful conversations and gather feedback.
- Use social media feedback to improve products and services. Monitor what customers say about your products to identify recurring issues or potential improvements.
- Measure customer sentiment. Sentiment analysis tools enable you to better understand customer satisfaction levels and adjust your messaging for timely communication.
Improve targeting across the business
With billions of active users and a lot of historical data at their disposal, platforms like Meta, LinkedIn, and TikTok allow companies to refine their audience targeting like never before.
Social media platforms collect vast amounts of data, including user demographics, location, interests, and behavior. Brands get access to this data through the platforms' native analytics dashboards or by using social media analytics tools.
The detailed information enables brands to create highly specific audience segments. For example, Facebook allows businesses to retarget people who have engaged with their content, visited their website, or made purchases.
LinkedIn’s audience targeting offers granular segmentation based on job title, industry, company size, and more.
This kind of advanced targeting dramatically improves ad performance and contributes to more relevant social media content pillars.
But the benefits go well beyond social media campaigns. Businesses can draw insights from audience data that help inform various parts of their businesses, from product development to recruitment and strategic decision-making.
Best practices for improving targeting through social media
- Leverage social media data. Platforms like Socialinsider allow you to track and analyze detailed audience behavior, enabling you to refine your campaigns with higher precision.
- Incorporate behavioral targeting. Track user behavior on social media to create more relevant and personalized ad experiences on all platforms.
- Use demographic and psychographic segmentation. To create content that resonates more deeply, break down your target audience not only by age, gender, and location but also by lifestyle, values, and interests.
- Combine organic and paid strategies. As Fatima Baig advises, combine organic and paid strategies to amplify reach and improve targeting.
- Conduct A/B testing. Continuously test different audience segments and messaging strategies to find the most effective combinations for your brand.
7 negative impacts of social media on business
As we've seen, businesses that approach social media in a smart, data-driven way have much to gain across the board. However, there are also potential social media marketing challenges that brands must be aware of and manage proactively.
Difficult attribution
Social media campaigns can increase brand awareness and engagement, but it can be difficult to tie these efforts directly to sales or other tangible business outcomes. This can lead to uncertainty in assessing social media ROI.
To address this challenge, ensure analytics tools are functional and integrated across the customer journey, from website analytics to social media dashboards. Instead of struggling to centralize various data points on your own, choose analytics tools that do the work for you.
Platform changes drive higher marketing costs
Tired of keeping up with frequent algorithm changes? You're not alone. The moment you think you got your social media strategy down, you have to change it again — and pay a higher price to get the same results.
This can drive up overall marketing costs, especially for smaller businesses that are trying to compete with larger players who have more resources.
Social media measurement can help you optimize your spending and allocate resources to areas of the most impact — and avoid getting distracted by changes and irrelevant trends.
Public relations crises and damage to brand reputation
One misstep on social media can quickly go viral. Whether it’s a poorly worded tweet, an unfortunate joke, or an insensitive response to a public issue, social media makes it easy for negative feedback to spread rapidly.
This can result in long-term reputational damage that's difficult to recover from.
Fortunately, you can use social media listening and social sentiment measurement to stay ahead of negative waves and proactively intervene to turn the emotional tide.
As we've seen in DigitalOcean’s case above, online comments can be harsh, but with real-time monitoring and prompt reactions, brands can turn frustrations into loyalty.
Negative engagement
All social media best practices strive to create more social media engagement, but not all is positive.
Negative comments, trolling, and customer backlash can impact a company’s online presence. This can turn potential customers away, leading to lost business opportunities. Continuously managing this type of engagement can also drain customer care resources and affect morale.
You can't avoid all negative engagement, but you can make it almost invisible when there is a lot of positive engagement. Create a strong community around your brand and encourage interactions that put your brand in a good light all the time, not only in times of crisis.
Privacy and security issues
Businesses often collect and store sensitive customer information via social media channels. With privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA, failing to protect customer data can lead to penalties and loss of consumer trust.
Ensure your social media marketing team works closely with legal partners to check for compliance with the latest regulations and with development to implement robust cybersecurity measures.
Demand for instant customer support replies
Customers are very exigent and expect brands to be available 24/7 on social media. They want their problems solved immediately, and if that doesn't happen, they can generate negative engagement.
All this can cause customer dissatisfaction and a spiral of incurred costs by allocating more and more resources to meet the high demands.
To reduce this challenge, be crystal clear to customers about response times. Create automated messages in social media inboxes to manage expectations and ensure your team has good processes in place to manage incoming requests promptly.
Social media data overload
As we’ve seen throughout the article, social media can be a treasure trove of data that can positively influence the entire business. But it can also be a burden when too much data creates noise, not insights.
Social media managers often struggle to make sense of the detailed analytics available on separate platforms. The result? They end up ignoring potentially vital information because of a lack of time and skills to centralize and interpret information.
Avoid data fatigue by using a tool like Socialinsider that integrates data from multiple platforms into easy-to-use comprehensive reports that provide information about your own channels, social media competitor analysis, and trends.
Final thoughts
Social media directly impacts business in both positive and negative ways. On the one hand, it can boost sales, improve customer engagement, and offer valuable insights that help businesses grow and be competitive. On the other hand, social media can be a public relations ticking timebomb and can drain resources without strategic allocation.
To minimize the risks and maximize positive outcomes, businesses must actively monitor public sentiment, get real-time insights, and efficiently leverage data for smart, timely decisions. Try Socialinsider for free to see how easy it is to make sense of social media analytics and turn risks into opportunities.
FAQs on the impact of social media on business
How powerful is social media for business?
Social media can have a great impact on a business' growth journey, helping generate brand awareness, sales, brand loyalty, and more.
