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Thinking inside the (computer) box
If your Phoenix marketing agency is staffed with people who do not yet understand the power of social media for business, you should be looking for more in-tune advice.
Social media--including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and blogging for business--can boost sales and raise awareness of your company and its products or services. You may be wondering what is happening now with social media marketing, what will be the future of it, and what you have to do to stay up with the future.
Is Social Media A Fad?
Mysterious to many, but very useful to a few
In using social media as a marketing tool, most commonly you will find moderate confusion. Those who have watched this medium develop from its beginnings are in better tune with it. The rest of us still struggle with understanding how a social anything correlates to a valid marketing method.
Time-intensity
The time commitment is one of the least understood aspects. According to surveys, 88% of marketers use social media to market their business but 72% of all marketers say they have only been doing it for a few months (or less). It takes those marketers about 5 to 10 hours each week to maintain the effort. The top three expectations for spending that amount of time are:
- Generating exposure for the business
- Increasing traffic to website businesses
- Building new business-to-business partnerships
Can you measure effectiveness?
If you don't know whether a social media marketing campaign is working, then how do you know what the return should be? As with all forms of promotion and advertising, if you are not going to monitor effectiveness and understand your ROI, then why are you investing so much time in it? Your Phoenix marketing agency, Thrive Marketing can help you there. It is a rather straight-forward process to adjust your site for measurements. Typical measurements to watch for include:
- Unique visitors (visitors minus repeated visitors)
- Pages viewed per visitor
- Time spent on site
- Total time per user
- Number of times visited
- How deep did they click through
- How many visits ended in a conversion to sales.
Measuring ROI of social media marketing
ROI (Return on Investment) is the elusive question since it's so difficult to track ROI just with social media. There is evidence, though. According to a recent study done by AdWeek, the value of a Facebook fan (or liker) of a product is worth about $3.60 each per year, in impressions (ads, etc.) about your product. The acquisition cost of a Facebook fan (or liker) ranges from about $1, down to just a few cents, over the period of a year to generate the same market income. That is approaching a four times more efficient investment to start, and the return on that investment for such users will be huge, as shown by experience.
Additionally, assume that if you are doing social media marketing via the internet, that you are also doing internet marketing through your website. You want to measure the success of the website in all metrics, but tracking those that come from social media sites can be identified separately. Thus, you will be able to tell if it has been effective in adding new business. Common tools in use at present include: Google tools (Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Alerts, and Blogsearch), Blogpulse, Tendpedia, Trendrr, Technorati, and Twitter Search. These tools are all free and are only a few of the many tools available to track your social media marketing results.
Leveraging social media to enhance your performance
A Social Media Landscape chart we have located on our website can show you how each digital marketing method best leverages to social media sites (enlarge in your browser with <CTL +++> to enlarge enough to read easily).
- Traffic
- Conversions (Leads)
- Time on Site
- Engagement Time
- Bounce Rate
- SEO rankings
- Number of followers
- Number of blog subscribers
- Brand lift
- Chatter/Sentiment
- Number of video views
- Replies to blog/ Twitter/ Facebook posts
- Number of user generated content (videos, photos, forum, stuff people are creating to support your brand)
- Finally, how willing people are to recommend you
Keeping up with the future of social media marketing
Definitely, there will be more and more companies penetrating social media as a marketing vehicle. That means you will have to get into position to be better at it than your competition. By reading this far, you have already started. It will also mean that you will have to invest in time, or an additional staff member, to spend the necessary time to manage as well as to grow your social media strategy. Combined with first, a makeover of your website to make it more user-friendly; second, the addition of search engine optimization; and third, an intuitive check-out shopping cart, more of your sales will come from your website while you do other things to build the business. That, of course, is what it is all about: letting the customer come to you and buy your products or services while you work other avenues of the business growth.
Getting started now
The best two places to break the ice is to create your own social profile (your personal one--not for your business) on Facebook and Twitter. Get to know how each works, what the social etiquette is on each one and then you'll begin to see how it will work for your business. Both are easy to learn and use.
Facebook is where the bulk of society traverses. Facebook has become the premier hang-out whose users are nearing 400 million users worldwide. About 80,000 other sites connect to Facebook making it a whole community of billboards for people, interest groups, and businesses. The average Facebook user spends about an hour per day. That adds up to a lot of time if there is no expectation from it.
Twitter, on the other hand, is much more than a social site. Twitter has become more interest-based. It is also the most up-to-date search engine for fresh information that you can find. Twitter allows you to follow people in your area of interest (and let them follow you). You can also talk openly and directly to companies. Responses almost always come back in seconds to minutes. Twitter's message limit is also 140 characters so people tend to get right to the point.
Get advice from experts
Social media marketing is an aspect of successful business promotion you need to be aware of as well as prepare yourself for a future that includes more social media marketing. Thrive Marketing understands and leverages social media marketing in ways few other people have not yet discovered. To learn more about how Phoenix marketing agency, Thrive Marketing, can use social media marketing to give your company a boost, call us at our toll-free number, 866-521-0827. We would be delighted to talk to you about how to make your business thrive.