THE

Social Media

NETWORK

Congratulations, you’ve put your business into the online domain with a professionally designed website. Your branding looks attractive and you’re satisfied with the number of hits and enquiries you have coming in as a result.

Go back a few years and this would have been a perfectly acceptable business practice for those online. But in the past couple of years it’s no longer about spending your marketing budget on campaigns like Google Adwords.

Social Media is already a dominate force in creating brand awareness, those that embrace it have the potential to grow their businesses to new levels.

Those that don’t will be left behind.

What is Social Media?

An old form of social media before the advent of technology would have been called “word of mouth”. Now to that word of mouth we’ve added elements such as pictures, video and audio and you have an idea of what Social Media is all about.

Globally people are interacting with each 24/7 online

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Why Should We Bother?

Social Media is now the number one online activity beating shopping, e-mail and (don’t be offended) pornography.

2/3 of the online population participate in it on a daily basis and this is growing at a rapid rate.

The question shouldn’t be “why should we bother?”, it should be “why aren’t we doing this?”

Because if you aren’t then your competitors will be.

The Basics of Social Media

I’m sure you’ve heard of facebook, it’s impossible not to. 2010 saw the release of ‘The Social Network’, a film about the creation of the site. Not

bad when you consider it’s only been in the public conscious for five years

Currently there are around 600 million users of the site worldwide. Who wouldn’t want to tap their business into that customer base?

The great part is that it’s easy.

The Basics of Social Media

One company who adopted a social strategy early on was Threadless. This US company grew a community where customers voted on what t shirts they liked, the winners were printed and sold. The social aspect of the

company resulted in a seven figure turnovers.

With facebook, the company has their own page where they share designs and also post frequent videos with a fun theme. The social interaction with

their customers is excellent and over 240,000 users like this page alone.

The Basics of Social Media

Of course your business may not be orientated towards this young fun approach but just by having a facebook presence you are tapping

into a global customer base.

You can adopt a three ‘I’s approach

• INFORMATION – Tell people about your services• INTERACTION – Ask users for feedback, comments etc• INSIGHT – Post information that gives users a look into your

business

Slowly you can build your customer base on facebook, just give them something to ‘like’ and you’ve then got an avenue to sell your

products – all it takes is some short and sweet postings and build from there.

The Basics of Social Media

If you find that your marketing budget isn’t getting an ideal return on platforms such as Adwords then you can also run campaigns on

Facebook tailoring your efforts towards select demographics.

A small but effective site advert can push users to your facebook page and from there, your site, your products and more.

But wait there’s more……

The Basics of Social Media

Your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to interact with other people in the confines of 140 characters or less. Welcome to the

world of Twitter.

Twitter is great way of interacting socially and globally. Celebrities, businesses, normal people all come together to comment, update and share.

As a business tool it can be used to highlight site updates, communicate with customers or just have a bit of fun.

Social Selling

Groupon has fast become a great way for businesses to build their customer base by offering a great deal through Groupon. For a percentage of the sales, Groupon will sell your deal to their customers. Those that buy the offer will then be coming to your site, give a good experience and future sales should follow. It really is low to no cost marketing.

A Fine Social Scene

So we’ve touched on a few things you can do in the social media realm to get your website out there. It’s an ever changing world but one that can be extremely worthwhile once you take the time to build a presence. Make it fun, make it interactive.

I’ll leave you with an example of how Social Media has impacted a recent scenario and how it could be a benchmark for it’s industry in the future.

Social State

In 1994 Kevin Smith self financed his first film ‘Clerks’ on credit cards. The cult success of the film allowed Smith to build a good fanbase which he would interact with via message boards online since the mid 90’s. Since then he has managed to build a small social empire revolving around Twitter and his own podcast network. He has decided to bypass the hollywood system with his latest film ‘Red State’ and use the power of social media to get his film out to audiences.

With twitter alone, he has 1.7m followers, add to that over 300,000 downloads of his podcast per week and you have an audience that are already interested in the film. Smith has seen that this removes expensive marketing costs and puts the film into potentially great profits – if it works, expect many other films to follow suit.

Finally…..

I hope you’ve found this little presentation helpful, if you want to know more or just discuss Social Media, E-Commerce, The price of milk. Then get in contact with me socially!

Twitter - @TonyGAllenwww.tonygallen.co.uk