Unless you’ve been in hibernation for the past couple of years, you can’t fail to have noticed that something called Social Media is all over the news and on everyone’s lips at the moment. Along with websites, email, apps, mms, texts, good old fashioned phone calls and, shock horror, face to face conversations, it’s one of the seemingly endless number of ways we now have to communicate with our customers.
Before we go any further, take a minute to consider the six main benefits of Social Media:
It gets people talking about your brand. It gives very quick results. It can be easily targeted. It improves your search engine rankings. It works alongside your traditional marketing. It can cost nothing.
But how well are we coping with this plethora of communication methods? I know from working on the new BADA website that it can be very time consuming. BADA has embraced the world of Social Media, on top of the regular website updates, newsletters, news releases and magazine columns. It could easily be a full time job just keeping on top of all the communication tools at my disposal, never mind anything else. It’s taken me a day to get the link from our Flickr page to the Facebook fanpage to work properly, and that’s just the mechanics, never mind actually making use of them for communications.
It’s difficult to get an accurate figure for the number of social media sites, but it’s well in excess of 200 and there are literally thousands of apps that work with them. And here are a couple of really mind-blowing statistics: Facebook has 200 million active users and there have been, as I write this, 21 billion tweets on Twitter.
So you would be forgiven for thinking it must be nigh on impossible to actually reach the people you want to talk to. It’s overwhelming; how do you sort out which applications to use, how to target effectively and what sort of time to allocate to maintaining them?
Next time in part 2, how to get started.
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