We often talk to people who do not consider social media to be an important part of their online marketing strategy. Often the reason cited for this is that none of the competitors are active on social media. Want to know why this is a fundamental mistake? Read on…..
When considering if your business needs to think about social media, you actually only have one important question to ask; do your customers user social media? With around 250 million users on Facebook, and almost 200 million on Twitter, the likely answer is “yes”, your customers and potential customers are using social media.
What you may be wondering is how you create a sales channel in order to engage with these half a billion or so users. Below are a few of the techniques we use for our customers, which hopefully will benefit you in trying to write your own social media strategy.
Think About Your Customers
No matter if you are a retail outlet, a service provider or a b2b provider, it is highly likely that one of your most important sales channels is your existing customers. You are likely promoting your new products and offers to these people via mail, email and your website. Social media can be the most instant and effective promotion tool if you have managed to engage in some way with your existing clients. For example, have you encouraged your clients to follow you on Twitter and Facebook?
Imagine you have 200 regular customers, and all 200 follow you on Facebook. If you promote one of your products on Facebook, your potential reach is 200 people. However, should one of your customers LIKE your product, your potential reach becomes your own followers, plus those of your customers. As social users tend to have friends of a similar mind-set, it is highly likely that some of your customer’s friends will also be interested in your product or service.
Your Rankings & Traffic
Let’s keep this simple; Google uses Twitter and Facebook activity to determine your rankings on Google search results. What’s more a website can rank for a phrase purely on the back of social media activity. This means that by posting quality content on Twitter & Facebook, you can not only gain direct traffic to your site from social users, but you can also gain and increase in your organic rankings.
With the sole reliance on Google for your traffic, you are also in an eggs in one basket scenario. Using social media allows you to diversify where your visitors are coming from and thus decrease your reliance on Google.
Better Targeting
One thing which we do for our customers as part of social media activity, is to time the activity according to the most active time of the audience. Building this type of data does take time, but once you know for that the best time to post a promotional tweet is 3pm on a weekday (for example), it allows you to increase your conversion rate, reduce your bounce rate, and time your marketing activity in-line with your customers activity.
Respond To Trends
By monitoring social media for relevant and popular activity, you can tailor your own business offerings to react. For example, if you in the business of selling Children’s Toys, by monitoring the popular hashtag #toys you can start to monitor what your customer base is interested in and searching for, and thus create relevant offerings to promote using the same hashtag.
If you would like to talk to us about our social media plans, then why not get in touch.