Honestly, Social Media is a huge boon to business. Sure, you can use it to contact family and friends, keep up to date with things in your circle of influence, or your community, but where it really shines is in the ability to actually help your business grow. It doesn't matter whether you're starting out or not, Social Media is extremely important to anything that you want to do business-wise.
With that said on just how powerful Social Media can potentially be for any business from small to large, let's at least step into the actual ways Social Media can impact you if done correctly.
The first major impact that Social Media has is, of course, with Branding. Branding a business in this day and age is a great way for a business to outreach further to customers, clients, and instantly get you recognized. Whether it's through a logo, your products or services, or anything like that, it'll help you stick in people's minds a lot easier and can certainly give you a leg up over competitors.
And honestly, what better way to improve your branding is improving engagement through social media where you can reply to people, introduce products and services, run raffles and contests or generally just do things that'll help get eyes on you and traffic to your websites.
This leads to the second major impact; engagement. As mentioned above, you can start to actively engage with an audience who in turn will start to engage back with you. This, of course, has two major effects - especially if it's positive. Not only does it establish a relationship between you and the potential customer/client, but if the interaction is positive this can lead them to either retweeting/reblogging/sharing anything that you post, which will further draw eyes to your Social Media Account.
After all, that's the ENTIRE point of Social Media: To be social with other people. By doing so, you've made someone who will think of you positively and come to you first for their needs if they need something that you offer - which creates Brand Loyalty - and also made them want to share that positive interaction with other people who will see that and also want to come and check you out which further drives up engagement and can potentially help you to reach your targeted demographic a lot easier.
The third major way that Social Media impacts businesses are in feedback. Normally, you don't get instant feedback, and when it comes time to analyze your marketing strategies you often need all sorts of information to see if it was effective or not - and to potentially ask customers directly via surveys and all on what you're doing well, and what you're doing wrong.
Not so with Social Media. If you do something wrong, your audience will immediately let you know, and if you do something good they will also let you know. Often you can tell how well received your posts and all on Social Media are via engagement and immediate feedback via comments and all and that often can tell you exactly what you're doing right, where you're going wrong, and can course-correct any marketing strategy on the fly.
Of course, there are a lot of other ways that Social Media helps businesses with growth and all, but these are at least the three major ways that can help out in amazing, impactful ways. In today's modern business world, not having a Social Media Marketing Strategy can seriously be detrimental.