Social Media Followers for Your Business
It’s not something you can ignore any more: social media is having a huge impact on marketing, the way people do business, and the strategies used to attract customers. While originally, never intended to be anything more than a casual, fun way to use the Internet and connect with others, its very popularity has made it a potentially powerful marketing tool.
In a way, the development of social media mirrors that of other, earlier forms of advertising: if a lot of people saw something, that something was a good advertising medium. From signs in the outfield in a baseball stadium to billboards on the highway, mass-viewed signage followed the first rule of advertising back in the day: saturate. The rule when you couldn’t control who got your message and who didn’t was: hit as many people as possible. Gradually, more “efficient” methods of advertising developed, such as targeted marketing.
What does this have to do with social media, you ask? Well, the lesson to take away is that for the first time in the long history of advertising, businesses don’t have to target their marketing; the businesses have become the targets. If you had suggested to an advertiser 20 or 50 years ago that he would be able to market only to those people who had shown an interest in his products, he would probably have fainted from sheer joy. Mass marketing was a hugely inefficient strategy, but it was really the only one available if you wanted to get your message to enough customers. Now, your marketing can be tailored to those persons who want to be your customers. This is a tremendous gain in efficiency, and a correspondingly huge reduction in costs.
How do I Market on Social Media?
One word: differently.
Most of the advertising we see is still conveyed via mass media. As a saturation rather than a targeted technique, mass media advertising assumes that the vast majority of the people who see/hear it have no particular interest in, knowledge of, or inclination to buy the product. Thus, most of its message is persuasive; the idea is to talk that disinterested person into buying the product. You might notice that there often isn’t much description of the actual product or what it does; this is because there isn’t time for persuasion and description both.
Social media marketing is a different animal altogether. Your audience has presumably already passed through the persuasion phase when they have agreed to “like” you on Facebook or “follow” you on Twitter, etc. This means that the content you show to your already loyal customers should be sharply different in tone that traditional persuasive advertising. Your update content, therefore, should be informative and entertaining rather than persuasive. You can perhaps gently lead the customer toward a more expensive product or introduce something new, but you should definitely not be heavy-handed about it. Since most mass media advertising is pretty loud and blatant, you might have it embedded in your consciousness that advertising has to be that way (otherwise, presumably, it would be ineffective). The tone of your updates and loyal-customer marketing, however, should be muted rather than loud; confidential rather than broadcast from the rooftops.
A database of loyal, interested customers is an asset beyond price for a business. Social media updates and marketing tools allow a business to cultivate that pool of customers as well as add new ones to the pool; the business’s webpage can contain prompts to like or follow on social media. Make these invitations visible but not so obtrusive that they detract from your website content: if people are interested, never fear; they will click on your +1 button.
Small Businesses and Non-Profits
Social media-based targeted marketing is a boon for entities that have severely restricted budgets, such as small sole proprietorships and non-profit charities. Ask any small businessman what his biggest worry is, and he’ll say “cash flow.” Ask him what his greatest need is, and he’ll say “affordable advertising.” Social media marketing is both very cheap and very effective. This becomes more and more true the more specialized is a business and/or the products it sells. It is simply impossible (and financially inadvisable) to try to reach every person who might be interested in Lebanese food or Harley-Davidson repair via mass marketing. It is easy (and financially savvy) to use a well-constructed website, good SEO content, and social media marketing to reach only those people who are interested in your products. The good marketer no longer randomly fires arrows into the dark, hoping that a few of them will hit the target; he now holds up the target and invites people to hit it.
Non-profit organizations in particular can benefit from the efficiencies of social media marketing. One of the thorniest problems for non-profits is soliciting for donations. Mass marketing is usually too expensive and, since the set of people who are willing to donate to a given cause, charity, or organization is usually very small compared to the general population, inefficient. If funds are limited (as they usually are), a non-profit will want to spend those funds (and the finite amount of time its volunteers and employees have) on the best and most efficient marketing strategies.
It is a truism in non-profit targeted marketing that the best prospects for giving are those who have given before. Social media is a wonderful tool for bringing these people into an “inner circle” of trusted friends for whose support the organization is deeply grateful. Social media updates can be used to inform the benefactors of what programs their contributions are supporting and news about those programs. It can also be used to dispense rewards, such as event tickets, special invitations, etc. to those valued members. Most people who give to charitable and nonprofit organizations do want to be recognized and acknowledged for their contributions, and they can therefore be invited to receive updates on social media as members of those organizations. The beauty of this is, if they truly want to remain anonymous, they can simply opt out of those updates.
