If you’re a small business owner, sole proprietor or even part of a marketing team in a corporate environment, you might wonder how social media fits into your business plans. If you’re sure you can get a better ROI by networking at local luncheons, on your phone, or even by sending out mass emails rather than using social media upstarts like LinkedIn and Twitter, this article is for you.
One of the first things you need to consider is the big picture and not the individual tweet. Social Media is the world’s water cooler and the people doing a majority of the talking are millennials; members of the most sought after target demographic among marketers. According to experts at the highly acclaimed Pew Research Center, millennials (aged 18-34) have become the largest living generation in the United States.
And there’s good reason to pay attention to the way they communicate since the Baby Boomers’ telephone conversations and handshakes have been replaced with an insatiable appetite for smartphones and social media. In a nutshell, that means you need to tap into social media resources to be successful; at least partially because 80% of Internet users use a smartphone according to SmartInsights.com. Here’s a few of the things you need to know to get started.
Social media marketing uses the tools that are best utilized when you learn to listen to what your target market is trying to tell you. When you understand that 6000 tweets are sent per second on Twitter, which corresponds to over 200 billion tweets per year, you’ll see how much information is being sent and received by your target demographic. It’s easy for you to ascertain just what and how their wants need to be met just by how they express themselves on social media.
Remember, that same metric applies to the other big names in social media marketing like Facebook and LinkedIn. There are more than a billion people who use Facebook and the company has interesting offerings – like the latest carousel ads that can have up to five clickable images in a single news feed – but that type of interaction only scratches the surface of what can be accomplished with social media.
Adding content in your own voice and interacting with your clients builds a reputation that leads to lasting relationships and increased sales. It’s all about leveraging that vast goldmine of information to achieve business goals within a modern marketing plan.
