Social media
is no longer just the domain of high schoolers and hipsters posting about
Sunday brunch. There over 3 billion internet users, over
2 billion of which have active social media accounts. Facebook, Twitter,
Pinterest, LinkedIn and even Snapchat have become vital to success in the
business world, particularly for start-ups and those looking to extend brand
awareness beyond their core audiences.
In 2011,
Hiscox
commissioned a study looking at business usage of social media with responses
from 305 owners, partners and senior decision makers from UK SMEs with between
1- 249 employees. They found that 57% of small businesses use social media in
their marketing with the most common purpose being to increase brand awareness
and boost sales. Facebook was the most popular platform with 19% using it for
business related activity, compared to 14% using LinkedIn. These figures have
only increased in more recent years.
Social
media is mostly free and can provide businesses with valuable metrics about
their customers and the ways in which they engage with specific content. In fact,
social media generates a massive amount of data about your customers and their
online habits in real time, every day.
Engagement
Through
daily active engagement and ‘social listening’, you can gather customer data
and use that information to make smarter, better informed decisions about your
business. This means directly interacting with customers to find out what they’re
talking about, what they want and how they use your products. Respond to
tweets, ask questions and follow hashtags.
There
are many tools that you can utilise to make analysing the data collected by social
media platforms easier, in order to gauge customer reactions to content, tap
into conversations happening around your brand, and find out what works and
what doesn’t. For example, Hootsuite
Insights enables users to gather together information from across all their
social media platforms in real time and in one place.
Social Media Listening
Basically,
social listening means actively seeking out what is being said about a company,
brand, topic or person on social media channels. This could mean anything from
tracking mentions of your company on Facebook to keeping track of trends in
your industry that competitors are posting about on Twitter and LinkedIn.
There
are many ways to engage in social listening. You could set up Google Alerts to
track keywords in your industry or use Social
Mention to monitor over 100 sources to measure what people are saying about
you and your business. TweetReach offers basic, easy to use listening tools and
ViralHeat allows you to not only listen to conversations about your brand but
also to ‘identify trends to drive insights around your social media performance’.
Social
media listening can massively aid in customer care – if you are actively
hearing what your customers are saying, you can jump in and solve problems or
just engage with your happy, satisfied customers. In the same vein, it provides
direct access to feedback and can generate higher converting leads, through
solving problems and highlighting your great customer service to future
customers.
Targeted Advertising
Advertising
on social media can be targeted towards specific demographics, promoting your
business and distributing content to the people who you most want to reach. And
then you can track and measure the performance of those ads in real time,
allowing you to measure whether your desired audience are responding well to
the copy and design.
For
example, an ad campaign on Facebook can be targeted by location, age, interests,
behaviours and friends among many others, making your advertising more
effective. So if your company sells, for example, textbooks to university students
and is based in Cambridge, you can ask Facebook to show your ads to people who
are students at Cambridge University or are based in Cambridge and have
expressed an interest in higher education.
Top Tips
1. Build your channels
early. Start as you mean to go on – become a resource for information and a
trusted communicator right from the start.
2. Find your audience.
Different audiences can be found on different platforms so figure out where
your target market can be found and focus on those platforms. For example,
younger audiences are more likely to be found on Snapchat and Instagram, whilst
older demographics tend to favour Twitter and Facebook.
3. Discover and create
relationships with influencers. It’s not just what you know, but who you know.
4. Be a part of the conversation.
Know what people are talking about and actively interact with them – social media
is all about community and the personal touch.
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