I’ve just written a short document for a prospective client that’s a sort of overview of Social Media., and I thought that it might be worth sharing for those in that kind of ‘I know about social media, but I’m not quite sure what I know’ kind of place!
Firstly, social media isn’t an advertising channel, and it certainly isn’t a cheap way of talking to large numbers of businesses – but it is a very efficient way of engaging large numbers of businesses and if part or all of your sale (assuming that you ultimately do a good job post-sale) is relationship based, then social media may very well offer a very attractive and appropriate way of achieving this engagement, helping to fill the pipeline, and making prospects more likely to buy from you.
Perhaps more interestingly though, it offers a way of engaging clients post-sale which is both less invasive then the old email/telephone/newsletter route, and potentially more effective, because smaller real-time snippets require less commitment to read and absorb.
Of course there is also a looming threat that as potential clients gradually migrate away from email towards more focused and closed systems, companies which are unable to embrace these new techniques are potentially going to be left behind or at best be playing catch-up with their rivals.
The main thing is to give your clients and prospects a choice of ways to engage and get close to you, today you wouldn’t dream of not having a telephone an email and a website…tomorrow it will be all of these and various social media platforms too.
So, in summary this is what each of the social networks can offer if you do it properly.
LinkedIn – a way to engage with businesses at a professional level, identify your targets, meet them, prove your credibility and convert them to clients. Although this is the most business focused network and a good starting place for most businesses it has its limitations. Globally only 72million members and low level of sophistication within the user base means that it may not be possible to connect with the right people, but if you do there’s a good chance that you can impress them. Also with the membership growing at in excess of 500,000/week at the moment there’s a good chance the people that you do wish to target will be there soon.
Facebook – although predominantly a social network people buy from people. Meeting, knowing and liking your potential clients cannot be a bad thing. Also with a membership of 520 million (including 30 million in the UK) pretty much everyone is going to be there. The loyalty of the member base is also incredible with over 50% of the members loggin-on at least once every day.
Twitter – although 140 characters doesn’t seem link much, therein lies the strength. With communications limited to s very short blast, people have time to read the ‘tweets’ that they’re exposed to. Longer messages can be delivered by point the reader at a web page somewhere, but the knack is to ‘hook the reader’ in that first few characters. This informal irreverent channel is a great way of spreading news in real time and although the tweets are gone in no time their presence is felt for quite a while as they are passed-on (retweeted) and because they are indexed by google.
YouTube – in addition to being the biggest video sharing site on the internet it is the second biggest search engine with over 2 billion video views every day and as part of the Google empire it means that whatever you upload to YouTube is easily indexed by google and displayed in the search results. It’s also worth remembering that video is a very powerful platform for spreading messages – that’s why you cry when you watch some films, seldom when you visit a website!
There are countless (well not literally but loads) other sites/platforms which may or may not deliver value for your business and sector, but these are the main ones which are worth starting with. To delve deeper in to the other possibilities it’s worth looking at The conversation prism to help point you in the right direction.
I hope that this is useful for those on the cusp of getting in to Social Media.
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