The Social Media Marketer

Social Business is Big Business

Tweet

 

I had no idea people spent so much time on social media!  Did you?  Yes?  Did you know that for every hour spent online, about 15 minutes is spent on social media.  Doing what?  A 2010 Nielson study tells us that we are spending about half of that 15 minutes researching products and services.  So, a lot of us are using our social media accounts to get information in order to make a purchasing decision.

This sounds familiar.  It sounds like what people are doing in general, by reading blogs, articles, email newsletters and web content.  It is, in fact, content marketing at work.

Social media may appear on the surface to be a social tool, and it is.  But, it is rapidly becoming so much more.  Just as the phone that was once used only for making calls morphed into the mobile device capable of doing pretty much everything, social media has evolved from a “hey what’s happening” thing into a medium in which all kinds of interactions are taking place.

“Social business” is now big business, and it’s producing real ROI for companies of every size.  Success stories are not hard to find and they demonstrate both the power of social media in ecommerce and the need to refine the techniques.  As businesses get into it, they make mistakes and learn.  But, the potential as a marketing tool lures even those not familiar with social media and motivates them to stick with it.

Marketing with social media operates on essentially the same principles that marketing in general works.  It’s not so different.  Even in the heyday of traditional marketing, the best way to focus your marketing efforts was to find out what your customers want.  So, too, with social media marketing. What has changed is the methodology.  Social media is replacing focus groups and direct mail surveys with real time feedback and conversation.  Companies can now change their tactics on the fly, based on daily commentary and discussion about their products and services.

Businesses can also easily join the conversations.  They can keep their ears to the ground and even check in on the competition.  Social media offers companies the perspectives of hundreds or even thousands of potential and existing customers without the need to spend time and money on questionnaires and surveys (yes, even these can be added to your SM pages for instant feedback).

So, you can get in on it or not.  But it’s going on with or without you.  It seems fairly obvious that, when hundreds of millions of people worldwide are spending 15 minutes of their time every day in one place, if you’re a business, that’s where you want to be.