Jimmy Rodela
© Nomad_Soul/ Dollar Photo Club
To put the popularity of social media into proper perspective, allow me to share with you some statistics from wearesocial.net as of August 2015. And mind you, these figures are projected to quickly increase each month.
http://wearesocial.net/blog/2015/08/global-statshot-august-2015/
The figures are quite staggering, aren’t they?
However, if you think these are all the numbers you need to know about social media, check out this additional statistics from thesocial-lights.com.
- 82% of SMBs find social media effective for lead generation.
- 90% find social media to be an effective branding tool.
- 86% of active Twitter users say they plan to purchase regularly from an SMB they follow on the platform.
- 93% of marketers use social media for business.
- 70% of marketers have successfully used Facebook to gain new customers.
- 43% of marketers have successfully used Twitter to gain new customers.
At this point, it becomes clear to all day-to-day business owners why they should jump right in the social media bandwagon.
It does not only have the capability to bring in more direct sales to their businesses, but it also works wonders when it comes to building relationships with their prospect customers (among others).
Social media monitoring.
“Because we can quickly respond to our target audience’s feedback through social media monitoring, our sales have grown drastically, and nurturing our relationship with our target audience has never been easier.” – JoinVIP
One of the best ways that businesses are utilizing social media to further their growth is through social media monitoring.
If you aren’t quite familiar with the term, it is the process of monitoring/listening to conversations, groups, or products (among others) via the social media platforms in real-time. This keeps businesses updated about the ins-and-outs of what’s happening in their niches.
How does social media monitoring help you with your business, you might ask?
1) You can learn from your customers’ feedbacks.
Whether you’re trying to map out your next marketing campaign, or you’re trying to identify areas in your product that you’d like to improve; learning from your customers’ feedback can be such a goldmine for your business.
The sad part is not many of your existing customers take the time to tell you about their two cents about your product. In most cases, they just share their thoughts on other niche-related pages, groups, or they just publish it on their social media profile’s timeline.
If you aren’t using social media monitoring, then you have missed on several of the feedbacks that your customers are sharing about you and your product.
2) You can easily identify who the influencers are in your industry.
Once you’ve identified who the influencers are in your industry, you can now tailor-fit your marketing campaigns to include building a stronger relationship with them.
The thing is, if you can turn these influencers into your brand’s advocates, they can help bring in TONS of leads – let alone sales.
That being said, instead of marketing to hundreds of people one at a time, you can establish a relationship with one person instead (the influencer), so he/she will be the one to market your business to his circle of connections.
3) You can reply to your customer’s complaints on a timely manner.
Replying to your customer’s complaints on a timely manner is a crucial element of reputation management.
Before one of the complaints snowball into something that can ruin your brand’s reputation to hundreds (if not thousands) of your customers, you need to address them as soon as you can.
If you aren’t using social media monitoring, a single complain about your company might end up going viral, all without your knowledge. With that, the entire conversion becomes a one-way lane where people are talking trash about your company, when it could have been a two-way lane where you can explain your side, and offer solutions to fix the problem.
What’s next?
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This article was originally published here.
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