THE
Social Media
NETWORK
Congratulations, you’ve put your business into the online domain with
a professionally designed website. Your branding looks attractive and
you’re satisfied with the number of hits and enquiries you have coming
in as a result.
Go back a few years and this would have been a perfectly acceptable
business practice for those online. But in the past couple of years it’s
no longer about spending your marketing budget on campaigns like
Google Adwords.
Social Media is already a dominate force in creating brand awareness,
those that embrace it have the potential to grow their businesses to
new levels.
Those that don’t will be left behind.
What is Social Media?
An old form of social media before the advent of technology would
have been called “word of mouth”. Now to that word of mouth
we’ve added elements such as pictures, video and audio and you
have an idea of what Social Media is all about.
Globally people are interacting with each 24/7 online
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Why Should We Bother?
Social Media is now the number one online activity beating
shopping, e-mail and (don’t be offended) pornography.
2/3 of the online population participate in it on a daily basis and this
is growing at a rapid rate.
The question shouldn’t be “why should we bother?”, it should be
“why aren’t we doing this?”
Because if you aren’t then your competitors will be.
The Basics of Social Media
I’m sure you’ve heard of facebook, it’s impossible not to. 2010 saw the
release of ‘The Social Network’, a film about the creation of the site. Not
bad when you consider it’s only been in the public conscious for five years
Currently there are around 600 million users of the site worldwide. Who
wouldn’t want to tap their business into that customer base?
The great part is that it’s easy.
The Basics of Social Media
One company who adopted a social strategy early on was Threadless. This
US company grew a community where customers voted on what t shirts
they liked, the winners were printed and sold. The social aspect of the
company resulted in a seven figure turnovers.
With facebook, the company has their own page where they share designs
and also post frequent videos with a fun theme. The social interaction with
their customers is excellent and over 240,000 users like this page alone.
The Basics of Social Media
Of course your business may not be orientated towards this young
fun approach but just by having a facebook presence you are tapping
into a global customer base.
You can adopt a three ‘I’s approach
• INFORMATION – Tell people about your services
• INTERACTION – Ask users for feedback, comments etc
• INSIGHT – Post information that gives users a look into your
business
Slowly you can build your customer base on facebook, just give them
something to ‘like’ and you’ve then got an avenue to sell your
products – all it takes is some short and sweet postings and build
from there.
The Basics of Social Media
If you find that your marketing budget isn’t getting an ideal return on
platforms such as Adwords then you can also run campaigns on
Facebook tailoring your efforts towards select demographics.
A small but effective site advert can push users to your facebook
page and from there, your site, your products and more.
But wait there’s more……
The Basics of Social Media
Your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to interact with other
people in the confines of 140 characters or less. Welcome to the
world of Twitter.
Twitter is great way of interacting
socially and globally. Celebrities,
businesses, normal people all come
together to comment, update and
share.
As a business tool it can be used to
highlight site updates, communicate
with customers or just have a bit of
fun.
Social Selling
Groupon has fast become a great way for businesses to build their
customer base by offering a great deal through Groupon. For a
percentage of the sales, Groupon will sell your deal to their
customers. Those that buy the offer will then be coming to your site,
give a good experience and future sales should follow. It really is low
to no cost marketing.
A Fine Social Scene
So we’ve touched on a few things you can do in the social media
realm to get your website out there. It’s an ever changing world but
one that can be extremely worthwhile once you take the time to build
a presence. Make it fun, make it interactive.
I’ll leave you with an example of how Social Media has impacted a
recent scenario and how it could be a benchmark for it’s industry in
the future.
Social State
In 1994 Kevin Smith self financed his first film
‘Clerks’ on credit cards. The cult success of the
film allowed Smith to build a good fanbase
which he would interact with via message
boards online since the mid 90’s. Since then he
has managed to build a small social empire
revolving around Twitter and his own podcast
network. He has decided to bypass the
hollywood system with his latest film ‘Red State’
and use the power of social media to get his
film out to audiences.
With twitter alone, he has 1.7m followers, add to that over 300,000
downloads of his podcast per week and you have an audience that are
already interested in the film. Smith has seen that this removes
expensive marketing costs and puts the film into potentially great
profits – if it works, expect many other films to follow suit.
Finally…..
I hope you’ve found this little presentation helpful, if you want to know
more or just discuss Social Media, E-Commerce, The price of milk.
Then get in contact with me socially!
Twitter - @TonyGAllen
www.tonygallen.co.uk