I make my living by taking the time and hassle out of managing your online presence, allowing you to run your company in the way you know best. As anyone in a similar field will tell you it’s not an easy task. Whatever combination you take has to be a harmonious marriage between your company, your product and your clients. You can only be successful if have a good understanding and relationship with your client and the client has enough trust in you and your brand to promote your product.
Is Social Media worth the investment for my company?
Currently Facebook has 200 million active members, if it keeps growing at the rate it has then it’s gonna hit the 500 million mark long before 2011. The fastest growing age group is 30-39 (44.8% spending 10+ hours weekly) followed by 20-29-year-olds (40.3% spending 10+ hours weekly) and then 50- to 59- year-olds (38.7% spending 10+ hours weekly).
I think this proves that Facebook is not for kids, its more suited to mature adults, intelligent adults with money to spend. So your demographics are on Facebook and you have to learn target this.
How do I start with all this new ‘Social Media’ stuff?
Ok I’m going to take it that you are new to engaging with your customers so my advice is to resist the temptation to jump into Facebook or a forum or anything that exposes your community at this point. Your primary concern is building up your tribe and you don’t want to be seen as a leader with only a few members in your gang. The best method at this stage is to start a newsletter subscription list and use innovative ways in making your clients want to sign up. Some may suggest that you dive right in and invite all your friends but at the end of the day it’s not about numbers, it’s about quality leads that count.
With LOL Productions we ran a competition to sign up for the newsletter and win a pair of tickets, in addition to this each ticket was printed with an optional more information request form printed on the back, after the first two shows we had over 400 people, once the tribe grew a Facebook fan club was setup, the e-newsletter tribe notified and LOL launched onto the Social Media scene with an established following.
To date it has over 200+ members all wanting more, not bad for a show that only takes place once or twice a year for two days.
Making that jump into Social Media?
You now have your following that are happy receiving your e-newsletter, you have segmented your tribe into groups that you target with relevant information and due to the fruits of your labour in nurturing your community with good relevant information, you can see your subscription rate growing at a steady rate.
It now looks like the time to make the jump into Social Media. Malta, unlike other countries is suffering from not having a successful home grown social networking platform other then OIM so we tend to stick to Facebook, the forever growing Twitter and for those that have the time (and you should really make time) a blog.
Whatever approach you use, you need to be made aware that only with consistency, the right balance of communication and engaging your users in what you do will this be a success.
LOL Productions now has a client base that it can directly market its product without incurring the costs it once did with traditional advertising methods.
Today’s media is fast paced and is not leaving us much time to reflect, you may end up only being news until the next Twitter or Facebook feed is delivered so don’t saturate your tribe or neglect them, getting that balance really is the key.
This short introduction underscores the importance of Facebook as it’s the most searched on this website. In reality you need to research your market first to see what Social Networking platform your clients are using. Personally I would not underestimate the importance of video and blogging so if anyone would like me to expand on this please feel free to comment.
Interesting!
In the past, offline media was one of the major mediums to promote one’s business and brand awareness. However, with the increasing popularity of the online media and its positive results, more people are turning to online marketing techniques to build a strong business presence across the globe. There are several online marketing strategies we can use for our Internet marketing solutions, but SEO (search engine optimization) today has taken a stance much ahead of any other technique.
SEO brings with it tremendous scope for business improvement with improved keyword positioning, improved ranking and overall increase in the ROI and cuts down on the PPC cost extensively in the long run. This is a proven marketing solution if done the right way using the right techniques based on your website requirements.
I thought this information would be helpful for those who wish to promote their website and get great results.
Thanks for your feedback Edward
I agree SEO places a very important role if done correctly along with a page of good content, networking and is usable, all factors that will allow you to race up the search engines and gain popularity.
Yesterday afternoon I gave a talk using an example of ‘Susan Boyle’ who a month ago was a name that not many people would know. Google now returns 16,100,000 for Susan Boyle in 0.05 seconds, turning her name into an SEO uphill climb.