Truthfully, I’m tired of hearing “social media isn’t right for our business.”
We’re past the days of thinking social media may be a good idea. Those who adopted social media into their business strategy are already moving on to bigger and better uses — such as using it for lead management. But for all of you still being hesitant to board ship, let’s go over exactly why your business needs to employ social media.
1) Everyone is using social media.
955 million Facebook users. 140 million Twitter users. That’s a whole lot of users. What’s more impressive is that, according to Digital Marketer, 91% of online adults use social media daily.
If you can justify creating billboards or paying for TV advertisements because of the chance that a large percent of the millions of drivers or TV viewers will see it — why can’t you use that same reasoning for social media? Something that won’t cost a dime and is actually measurable? The answer seems simple to me.
If that’s not convincing enough, how about the fact that if you’re not using social media actively, other people will be talking about your brand regardless? So why not be a part of the conversation or influence the topics being discussed? Because whether you like it or not, that dialogue is happening. It’s your choice to join it.
2) Social media messages influence consumer behavior.
According to Social Labs, 75% of shoppers who read social sharing comments have clicked on the product link in their friends’ Facebook posts, taking them to the product page on a retailer’s website.
Furthermore, 53% of the shoppers who have clicked through to the retailer’s site have made a purchase.
Social media platforms serve as discovery engines. They put products and services in front of users eyes while those users are in an unknown information search. Traditionally, the information search stage of consumer behavior is the stage in which consumers are seeking information for a product or service they want to ultimately buy. But when users are casually browsing on their social media channels, they’re not actively looking for products. Therefore, when they do see messages from brands (via RT, shares, etc), they are unknowingly putting that brand into their mind — an unknown information collection. Even though users are not actively seeking out information, they are collecting information. And when they are ready to purchase, that information previously collected will come to mind and influence where they look for further information. Depending on the message they originally saw on social, they may even directly search for your business. The simple fact that they knew about your brand will lean them towards using your product or service before trusting another brand they’ve never heard from.
While this takes patience, it allows your business to employ a long term business strategy. By having faith that your social media strategy will return its investment, you’ll start to see that ROI rolling in.
3) Social media efforts can be measured.
This last one is fairly obvious and used every time people talk about social, but it truly is important. What’s more important, however, is to realize that social media will not always show immediate results. Your messages on social media are incredibly high on the marketing funnel — they’re like the top of the funnel of the top of the marketing funnel. Your messages will often be the first time a user sees or hear anything about your brand. To understand this concept, focus on the share-ability of social media messages.
In fact, according to that same Social Labs study, 81% of consumers who purchase products they learn about through social sharing are valuable social sharers themselves, This means that the true power of social media is not just the messages you send to your followers or fans — its who they then retweet, reshare, and repost that information to. When your followers retweet your social media post, it goes to all of their followers. And that’s where that first touch is made, that’s how new people are exposed to your brand. Even if they take no action at that point, they have seen a message from your brand and are unknowingly storing that information into their mind, as discussed in point two.
Now you can go into your analytics tools — whether it be as simple as using the platforms tools, or as advanced as using the HubSpot software, you can see how many times your posts were clicked and shared. By using the HubSpot software you can track how users went from a social media message to a customer as well. You can’t do that with a billboard. Even if that customer doesn’t convert until 4 months after they initially saw your message, you know that you helped that customer purchase your product or service because they were exposed to your business first.
Photo credit: www.expand2web.
