Social Media

Social Media Isn’t Just Another Place To Advertise.

3 out of 4 Americans use social technology. It’s not a fad or passing trend, it’s a cultural movement. Consider these statistics:

  • 100,000,000 – The number of YouTube videos people watch each day.
  • 3,600,000,000 – The number of photos archived on Flickr.com
  • 3,000,000 – The number of Tweets per day on Twitter.
  • 5,000,000,000 – The number of minutes people spend each day on Facebook.

Even more amazing than the numbers is the fact that, due to exponential growth rates, most of them have already become obsolete since this was written.

Traditional marketing people look at numbers like this and salivate. They think of all the different ways to get in front of these people and push promotional messages out to them as if Twitter were one big TV network. The mistake they are making is assuming that traditional advertising rules apply to this new medium. They don’t.

The rules are different for social media.

Just because your customers are congregating online doesn’t mean that it’s appropriate or effective to interrupt them with promotional messages. In fact, that’s probably the single most annoying thing you can do. Social media is a relationship building opportunity, not an advertising platform. If you can understand that social media is basically the online equivalent of networking, you can understand why you don’t want to be that guy at the party that’s constantly trying to sell you stuff.

Your customers are having conversations online. Right now. The key to social media success is learning how to first listen to and then to participate in these conversations. It’s not about how many fans, followers or friends you can accumulate, it’s about how much value you can add to the conversation.

The last thing you want to do is rush out and set up accounts with every social media service you can find to insure that you have a “presence.” Unfortunately, this happens often when advertising agencies and other “marketing consultants” get involved. Pretty soon, you’ve got a business that is armed with a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a blog, a YouTube Channel, a user forum, a Flickr account and 17 other assets that could never be managed properly or affordably with the given resources.

So can we make money with this stuff or not?

The hardest thing for many businesses to accept about social media is that it doesn’t always provide instant gratification. You don’t get new customers calling in every time you publish a blog post. Because of this, most people that try social media end up abandoning it after a short period of time. It’s too bad, because making a commitment to building strong social media assets is one of the smartest things you can do to build your business and dominate your competition. And yes, that means you can make more money with it.

Contact Media will help you understand social media and how it fits into a profitable marketing campaign. Sure, we can build blogs and Facebook pages, set up Twitter accounts and build your YouTube channel; but more importantly, we’ll show you how to use these assets to develop deeper relationships with both customers and prospects. We’ll show you which tools make sense for your business and how to use them effectively. No confusing buzzwords, no B.S.

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