Are you engaging customers through social media? You should be. Nearly 93% of businesses now use social media as part of an integrated marketing plan. As more companies begin to use social media as a marketing tool it becomes undeniably clear that it’s a social media-user driven economy.
If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s fourth largest.
This leading social network added 100-Million users in less than nine months. Still think you can skip out on the social media craze? Consider the following statistics.
- 87% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees.
- The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
- 80% of Twitter usage is outside of Twitter…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
- Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
- The most recent count of blogs being indexed by Technorati currently stands at 193 million. The same report also revealed that, on average, 900,000 blog posts are created within a single 24-hour period.
- The online bookmarking service Delicious has more than 5 million users and more than 150 million unique bookmarked URLs
So, you see, it’s probably time to create a social media strategy for your business or brand. Not sure where to start? There are many possibilities and challenges when developing a social strategy. Depending on your line of work and the product or service being marketed you need to have an integrated social media strategy in place.
Define digital marketing objectives that are relevant to your industry. Do you want to spread your content and expertise to new audiences? Do you want to network with like-minded individuals and companies? However you define your objectives it’s important to understand that social media engagement should be a conversation – not a sales pitch.
Measure your social marketing efforts with analytics and online resources. One of the things that small-business marketers struggle with around the entire topic of social marketing is trying to jump into the next new thing without enough analysis of what they should focus on.
Start with the basics. Before moving deeper into social marketing be sure you have the basics covered.
1) Blogging: The foundation of the pyramid. Read blogs, comment on blogs, and then blog. This is the doorway to all other social marketing.
2) RSS: Aggregate and filter content around subjects and use RSS technology as a tool to help you repurpose, republish, and create content.
3) Social Search: This is often ignored in this discussion, but I think it’s become very important for small-business owners. You can participate and should stimulate and manage your reputation here.
4) Social Bookmarking: Tagging content to and participating in social bookmarking communities can be a great way to open up more channels to your business as well as generate extra search traffic. But it takes work
5) Social Networks: Branching out to take advantage of the numbers of potential prospects that you might find in sites such as Facebook or MySpace will frustrate, at least as a business tool, if you don’t have many of the above needs met. These networks take time to understand and thrive on ideas and content. You’ve got to have much to share if you wish to build a business case.
6) Micro: Platforms such as Twitter, Thwirl, Plurk, and Foursquare have become a very important part of the social media mix as they allow for quick tracking, joining, and engagement. However, they still reside at the top of the pyramid because without content, such as that created on a blog, the engagement on Twitter may not go very deep.
http://www.facebook.com/socialmeinc
http://www.socialmeinc.com
