Social Media and Its Benefits to Businesses

Content Marketing is one of the most important part in Inbound Marketing. However, if content is considered as a King, social media is Queen. Social Media helps you to distribute your content and engages with your customer. Without Social Media, there is no Content Marketing. The success of Content Marketing strategy bases heavily on Social Media distribution. Therefore, it is very crucial for business to choose the right online networks.  According to “ The Beginner’s Guide To  Social Media” of MOZ, social media is a way for people to communicate and interact online. Three main types of social media channels are owned media (hosted communities, blogs, etc), rented media (social networks or third-party communities), and occupied media (commenting, contributing, etc.). There is an explosion of social media channels growth over the last several years, such as Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter, etc. As reported by HubSpots, 74% of marketers saw in increase in traffic after spending just 6 hours per week on social media. The transformation in web consumerism and accompanying rise in social media brings both opportunity and responsibility for businesses. Not only does social media help to convert visitors into leads, but it also helps to engage to customers. Knowing the power of social media, the question given here is do your businesses have right strategy to maximize its efficiency and effectiveness? If you are not, my “3R” self-asked questions will help you to build effective social media marketing plan.

• Right Place: Did you choose right social media channels to connect with your customers? Choosing right social media channels is extremely important, the following charts will show the reasons why.

According to these charts, it is clearly to see that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have different types of target market. For rented social media channel, you have to study its target market carefully to see whether they have your audience or not. If you have excellent content, but you deliver to wrong audience, it would waste your efforts and investments. Therefore, you have to make sure that you deliver your content to right audiences by right social media channels.

• Right content: Is your content effective? If you have good content, you will generate sales more efficiently, pull in unexpected customers, build valuable relationships with your audience, enhance your brand image and boost your customer engagement. The better content that you create and distribute, the closer to the goals that you will get. Please see my previous blog to know how to write effective content!
• Right time: When should I deliver content to customers? According to KISS Metric blog, It’s important to know when the highest percentage of your audience is eavesdropping on your social networks—so that when you share content you’ll get maximum exposure. For example, on Twitter, the best time to tweet is noon and 6 PM and the best day to tweet is in the midweek and weekend.  The science of social media timing is very different from each social media channel. Therefore, to exposure the highest percentage of your audience for each content post, you have to research the timing of your audience in each social media channels.

DAVIDsTEA is a small business which was found five years ago in Montreal, Quebec. Today, DAVIDsTEA is recognied globally that celebrates loose leaf tea and relates to thousands of loyal customers on a personal level. The biggest contribution to their success is developing a lovable brand on Social Media strategy. According to Youri Hollier, DAVIDsTEA Social Media Manager, their social media strategy developed organically over time. The main goal has always been exposure and engagement. By sharing great content and “stepping outside of the comfort zone for businesses on social media,” they’ve had incredible success. While the content varies from channel to channel, their main content features recipes, contests, fan and staff-generated content, promotional posts and recurring posts – all with a fun modern twist while sharing their love for their product and customers. In addition, they are very good at two way communications on all Social Media channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Google Places, Foursquare, and Yelp. They respond to every comment, like and share – the good and the bad – on social. Unlike the other brands, instead of having robotic response, DAVIDsTEA treat everyone with unique conversation. I took screenshot of this conversation in their Facebook posts. Through the conversation, we can see how they show their respects and cares to their customers. This is just one great example from thousands and thousands nice conversations that they make.  Furthermore, the biggest problem that DAVIDsTEA faced as a company with regard to social media was capturing evening single tweet discussing DAVIDsTEA brand. To solve the problem, DAVIDsTEA integrated Hootsuite in to the workflow. Hootsuite allows them to set up streams and lists to ensure that everyone is responded to and conversations continue on Twitter. The clever Social Media strategy helped DAVIDsTEA to grow social business across North America, increase customer engagement, increase brand exposure, and gain 95-99% customer service satisfaction rate on Twitter. DAVIDsTEA is just one lively success story. Besides DAVIDsTEA, there are a tons of success business stories when they take advantages of social media. Aside from helping business in promoting company brand, increasing sales and enhancing customer engagement, social media also helps business to find good employees. Recently, I track internship opportunities in FaithLife Company and I found this below box in FaithLife’s website. Does it look very cool? No resume needed, LinkedIn will tell it all! Resume can be fake, but experiences cannot be fake. Through LinkedIn profile, it is easier for recruiters to see qualification of each candidate rather than one page resume. LinkedIn allows people to show what they did on their profile, like project, test score, publications, patents, posts, etc, so recruiters can evaluate the candidate’s talent based on what she/he has showed on LinkedIn profile.

In a nutshell, the longer you wait, the more you have to lose. If you have right strategy on social media marketing, it can lead to more customers, more traffics, more conversions, and more talented and qualified employees. If you have not deployed your social media marketing plan or had effective social media marketing strategy for your business yet, let’s start today!

Citation:

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/science-of-social-timing-1/?wide=1 

http://www.businessinsider.com/is-your-target-audience-on-twitter-facebook-or-linkedin-2010-2

http://blog.hootsuite.com/small-business-social-media-success-stories/