People will increasing meet up and 'exist' online!

Is Social Media a fad?

More importantly will it affect your business and can you use it get more business.

Here are a few facts for you to consider:

1. Facebook tops google for weekly traffic in the US
2. Social media has overtaken pornography as the  no 1 activity on the web
3. Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year
4. 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; 95% of these use Linkedin.
5. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year old females
6. Britney Spears has more followers on Twitter than the entire population of Sweden
7. 50% of the mobile internet traffic is for Facebook, imagine what this means for bad customer experiences
8. The younger generation see email as passé….Some universities have stopped distributing email accounts
9. You Tube is the 2^nd largest search engine in the world!
10. There are over 200,000,000 blogs. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products and brands. Do you like what they are saying about your brand?

So, it seems pretty certain to us here at Livetech that every business needs a presence on some kind of social network. In fact you could say that social med is the new ‘Word of mouth’. Note that 78% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family but only 14% trust advertisements

The problem you have as a business is what networks should you be active on. If you were active on every network highlighted above you’d probably not have time to do any work!!

Here are some guidelines for you to consider. It all depends really on what type of business you are and who is your target market.

If you sell relatively low value products or services to consumers then you should consider Facebook. It’s a good way to target the mass market. Friends and friends of friends can be targeted in various ways.

If you’re a professional services company such as an accountant, a solicitor, architect etc. then you want to be targeting other professionals. This means that you should consider Linkedin which is very business to business focussed.

Having your own blog is a great way of people finding you on generic searches on the internet. So if you’re targeting consumers do consider this.

You can use Twitter whatever business you are in, but you’ll get the most benefit if you’re targeting large amounts of consumers and have lots of interesting things that you can say on a regular basis.

If you’ve got a company video overview, then get it posted on YouTube, with the right keywords your business will be found. This can be used by any business.

There are pieces of software out there that can help you manage these different pieces of software, to the extent that you can type an update and post it to multiple accounts.

Now is the time to start using these services, adopt a playful approach…….

If you’d like to chat about how Social Media fits into your business and which channels you should be active on, please get in touch with the Livetech team. We’d love to have the opportunity to offer you some advice or invite you on one of our web marketing courses.