Why Does Your Online Business Need Social Media?
Online marketing is a continually evolving space and social media is becoming a more prominent part of the majority of online marketing strategies to increase business growth.
There are a number of reasons to increase YOUR use of social media to engage and reach potential customers and I will cover a number of them over the next few posts.
1: Reach
Why does a business that is using social media marketing spend so much time planning, posting, testing, and perfecting their social media strategy? One word; reach! Look at these statistics:
• There are 3 billion active Internet users and over 2.1 billion of them have social media accounts.
• YouTube has over 1 billion users. Did you know that this is more than a 1/3 of all web users?! Just think about the hundreds of millions of hours available on YouTube and how these generate billions of views.
• Facebook has nearly 1.4 billion users, and that is 47% of all Internet users. Do you know how many Likes are generated on a daily basis? 4.5 billion! And did you also know that nearly 75% of Facebook’s revenue comes from mobile advertising. 936 million Facebook users login in at least once per day and over 50% of marketers found a customer on Facebook in 2013.
• Twitter has 316 million monthly active users that generate over 500 million tweets every day!
• Google+ has 363 million users that hit the +1 button over 5 billion times per day.
• Pinterest has 100 million users and the majority of them are women (85%). 47% of Pinterest users purchase a product based on pins, with the average sale being $58.95. Some other Pinterest figures; 67% of pinned content is linked a business site and 82% of Pinterest users would rather follow a brand than a celebrity.
So are you impressed by these statistics?
These stats are just one reason to use social media marketing in your business and they really do highlight the reach that social media can give to your business, whether it is online or brick and mortar. In the next post we will look at relationships…
Facebook and email marketing
Facebook has 1 over billion users and over 600 million active daily users. And it also has the broadest age-range diversity, and all this means that you can get in front of a giant that caters to the needs to every business, every marketer, no matter what niche they are in.
Because it has such an active users base, and such diverse demographics, any serious business MUST be on Facebook.
This is why all businesses need to have a Facebook fan page. And the good news is that with the Facebook Fan page and its additional promotion tabs, you can combine Facebook and email marketing together to reach people and, most importantly, engage them!
This is great news for you in two ways: it adds value to your social media efforts and it also helps you build your email list efficiently.
There are numerous ways that a marketer or a business can increase their social presence on Facebook and engage their fans, hence creating brand awareness and building brand trust, while at the same time making sure they are building their email subscriber list.
However, out of the many methods available, only a handful are truly worth your time, effort, and the money you invest.
After all, even if you do need to spend money in order to make money (which is generally true), you know that the key is to have a great return on investment (ROI) and this means that you could effectively be getting subscribers for free! If you are spending $1 to gain a subscriber and your average ROI per subscriber is $1 you are building your list for free; in this case the key to building a list quickly is to spend more!
Next time we’ll look at how you can use Facebook promotions to engage your audience and how you can use those types of promotions to increase your email list.