Social media Marketing
Social media
Do you think you can avoid the current craze for social media marketing (SMM)? Consider this and think again:
Twitter
Twitter has somewhere in the region of 15 million UK account holders, suggesting over 32% of UK adults have an account – this figure is increasing daily
Over 50% of Twitter users use their feed to recommend products and services to their followers
Facebook
Yahoo and Google are the only sites worldwide which see more visitors on a daily basis than Facebook
Facebook has well over 30 million UK users, and a large proportion of those (75%) are adult users
Worldwide, Facebook has enough users to constitute the population of the 4th largest nation on the planet!
Most Facebook account holders login every day, usually more than once. This means that these ‘friends’ will be seeing your feed daily – the chances are they won’t be visiting your website daily!
Facebook users are often actively looking for more content. If they like your company or your product, then they will engage with you via Facebook.
Not only that, but:
Stats show that approximately 20% of visitors are directed to websites from social media sites.
66% of people who follow a brand on Twitter will then buy from that brand.
A similar percentage of companies who invest in social media marketing saw a significant rise in daily website traffic .
SME owners often feel that social media is simply too big to be of substantial benefit to their company. Actually, the opposite is true. Twitter and Facebook both have the power to involve your company in a small, friendly community. Even if your company is ‘low – tech’, i.e. building or beauty therapy, social media gives engagement and dialogue with customers and prospective customers via a trusted and familiar medium.
If users follow your feed, a sense of relationship will be created, along with a feeling of word of mouth recommendation. The act of reading your posts, commenting on your images and liking your tweets creates an intimacy almost impossible with traditional media. The fact that a huge proportion of users of social media now engage with their accounts on mobile devises adds to this – you are quite literally in your customers pockets!
If you are in an industry which has been slow to pick up on the wave of SMM marketing, then you are in a prime, completion killing position. Use your posts and feed as advertisement headlines, drawing in dialogue and response, highlighting an offer or brand aspect, and offering instantly accessible market research.
Google and the major search engines love social media. SEO is becoming increasingly complex, and many organisations spend a large proportion of their budget on SEO. Google sees Facebook as a public, open to search, popular page, which is likely updated with fresh, new content on a regular basis. This should mean that a good, regularly updated Facebook page will be highly ranked and help drive ever more traffic to your site.
What else do you need to know?
Twitter
Placing a Twitter follower count on your home page will show visitors your popularity, and act as a positive feedback message.
Using Twitter not only gives you a personal window into your customer base’s lives, but enable you to network, build relationships with both allies and competition, and get an insight on a regular basis to their businesses. You will have access to an ever updating stream of content, thoughts, ideas and resources to help move your business forward.
Feedback is instant. What are people saying about you? You can respond and review immediately.
Facebook is a fantastic option for both creating and reinforcing brand identity and awareness. Unlike Twitter, the Facebook account holder has ultimate control of what is visible, can design and create images, messages, the layout of the page, to ensure the user is seeing the best possible image of the company.
Facebook takes excellent advantage of the ‘viral’ effect. In essence, once you have created your network of friends who communicate directly with you, you will spread your message to their friends, and friends of their friends. If you post something to your feed, and 300 people see it, great. If 30 people comment, and they all have 100 friends, 3,000 people see it, and on and on.
Crucially, Facebook creates that magic business tool, engagement. By communicating efficiently with customers, dealing with their thoughts and desires, you will see that this dialogue increases, and places you in the position of trusted supplier and network contact far quicker than many other methods.
