Marketing Success with Social Media

Social Media. It may sound like a buzz word to many people but it really is an effective form of communication that businesses need to get behind. The influence of social media cannot be underestimated, as the rapid increase in smartphones and tablets gives us near instantaneous access to information and news.

The very concept of social media is permanently ingrained into us when you realize:

There are almost 6 billion mobile phone users on the planet. That’s almost 90% of the entire world’s population with the potential for mass communication.

♦ 1 in every 9 people utilise Facebook in some way.
♦ 700 billion minutes every month spent on Facebook worldwide
♦ 30 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook each month
♦ 190 million messages (tweets) over Twitter daily
♦ YouTube has 92 billion page views every month with 2.9 billion hours spent on the site per month.

As you can see, Social Media in a resource that can really benefit. The way forward it seems is to create amazing content and engage with people. Not potential customers, but regular people. This form of engagement should make these people advertise your business for you. This is the crux of the matter. The people who see your business should be willing themselves to tell other people about your service.

A great example of this is Appliances Online (AOL). They are a UK-based online white goods retailers who have embraced social media wholeheartedly. By actively engaging with people without a sales pitch and trying to get them to buy anything, AOL is being seen as a trustworthy company that people are telling other people about.

Social Bakers, an analytic site, rated AOL as #1 in their August Top 10 of highest engaging brands in the UK, in no small part to the efforts in building a relationship and a community with Facebook , Google+ and Twitter users. Over the last 12 months, AOL’s Facebook page has gained over 310 thousand likes, with over 8,000 followers on Twitter.

In fact, so confident are they that brand trust is a priority, that one strategy they also employ is a Facebook widget at the top of their site pages. This allows visitors to see which of their contacts recommend or like AOL, further enhancing the trust aspect.

Other great content includes the ongoing addition of high quality video reviews and features. AOL has a dedicated studio with highly modern camera recording and digital editing equipment, allowing visitors to AOL a real in-depth view into their products. Also, AOL is one of the few companies to add these videos to You Tube, allowing people to view them without ever even coming onto the site itself.

Through adopting a ‘don’t sell, will sell’ attitude to social media, small business’ such as AOL can really gain brand recognition that will prove highly profitable over the next few exiting years of mass communication.

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