Social media is an excellent way of obtaining instant hits to your site but many people don’t realise it is much more than just this. Today I want to show you it works and to explain that it is much more than just increasing hits…

I believe that the main problem with Social Media is that it isn’t always easy to gauge its success. Businesses think of social media as a tool for increasing visitors or sales and nothing else. What these businesses fail to realise is that it is much more than this. There are three other main factors which I believe are just as important:

Connecting at a personal level

Using social media means you’re connecting to your consumers at a personal and interactive level. If the consumer posts a complaint on a social media site like Twitter and the business can reply to that message it creates an environment where the consumer feels they have some power and that the company cares. There is a secondary benefit in that OTHERS subscribing to your channel can also see this happening in real time. You are not only appeasing the lone consumer but also the others who interact with you. You can create a real sense of trying which reaches out to a lot of people at the same time with hardly any expenditure.

Brand awareness

I read so few posts about Social Media where this is mentioned but creating brand awareness is such an important part of using it. The drawback is it is often difficult or even impossible to track sales through this.

I have only worked for one company where they understood creating brand awareness was a key part of their social media objectives and they fully embraced it knowing sales would increase as their brand name became more widely known.

Once you start using social media you will start to be talked about on the internet. You will get an online reputation which will lead to more brand awareness. As you post about new products others will spread the word which will in turn lead to greater brand awareness. Social media is an amazing tool for promoting your brand and you should never underestimate it!

Marketing

Unlike telesales a well managed social media campaign can be achieved at almost no cost and can reach out to far more people than a traditional campaign. You are targeting multiple consumers in real-time which means you can react in real-time and all those other consumers can see you reacting.

Another key point often forgotten is this: “You are targeting consumers who are specifically interested in your field or product”. You pay a fortune for these kinds of targeted consumer lists in normal marketing but with social media you tap into it for free!

Why should you use Social Media?

Social Media Tree. © Michael Targett and RBI

Think of Social Media as a “word of mouth” tool but on a much grander scale. With normal search engine promotion an important aspect is back links and creating new content. It can take many hours a week devoted to these two but with social media for the large part you can participate with just a couple of lines an hour and/or one or two blog posts a week.

If you add a really good blog post and it gets picked up by a bookmarking site like del.io.us it can drive an incredible amount of traffic (tens or even hundreds of thousands of new visits) to your site and build a huge amount of hype.

Search engines are also giving quite a bit of weight to social media and I’m going to stick my neck out and say this is set to increase throughout 2010. Google is already listing the latest twitter posts relating to some searches so it is already possible to get first page placement for keywords even if it is short lived.

It doesn’t matter how big or small your company is because social media can benefit all types and everyone has an equal chance of success.

How to use social media

Unknown copyright holder

A lot of social media revolves around hype and this can take time. Don’t leave it until the last minute as the rewards will not be as grand. Preparation is just as important as the implementation. Let me give you an example:

I was involved with a magazine at the Paris air show last year and the social media promotion went into overdrive months before the event. Once we had established a hash tag for twitter we surged our efforts.  We had tweets, blogs, post casts, video blogs, news articles, facebook promotions and more. Our stand was the busiest it had ever been and we generated a six figure increase in revenue at a time when advertising was on the biggest nose dive for many years. Our competitors were frantically trying to catch up but our lead was too strong and we dominated the show.

It is simply never too early to start the hype!

I have two examples where the sites were chugging along and then they utilised just a single social media tool (Twitter). The bottom spikes was from just 3 posts which took less than twenty seconds to write:

If you’re not yet using social media you are missing out on a lot of brand awareness, visitors and sales. The cost per visitor is minuscule so utilise it to its fullest!

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