Facebook, that social media phenomenon turns 10 years old in February 2014. It has over 125,000,000,000 members (ONE AND A QUARTER BILLION). That on its own is an incredible number of people, about the population of China and more than the population of India. But what is more important is that more than half that number use Facebook on a daily basis. As at the end of January 2014 over three quarters of a Billion people were logging in daily.
Twitter claims about a billion users but it is possibly only has about 650 million as registered users. Twitter is very different allowing a very short burst of data in a "tweet". 140 characters is the maximum it allows to get the message out. Nevertheless there have been over 300 billion of these since the inception of the service. Twitter is now a major source of news and political information for many. Its website handles 1.6 billion search engine queries daily and is in the top ten of most visited websites world wide.
Beyond these 2 there are a whole host of other so called Social Media sites which enable people to do mass communication and stay connected with one another and indeed with many they do not actually know but with whom some connection has been formed.
All this is cool but how can my business benefit you may well ask. And well you might as the answers are not so apparent.
Obviously there is advertising. But Advertising on Facebook and Twitter and other social media sites is not very obvious or universal. When one clicks into one's homepage on Facebook (You do have one don't you?) or click on an app some small adverts might appear but they are not intrusive. BUT they are targeted.
The beauty of Social Media adverts is that they only display to people who are possible customers. This ad election is based on their preferences, likes and groups and what they are. Should you wish to target parents of high school children it is possible, just as it is to target would be home buyers in Houston Heights or holiday villa's in Cancun.
The important thing is correctly defining the target market and then finding out precisely what they want so you can design your advert to meet that requirement. The same thing on most other social media websites. Advertising is no longer a shotgun, spray and pray that you get someone interested, but far more scientific and displaying to people likely to be interested and respond to what you are selling or the service you wish to provide.
Yes you could do it yourself and many people do and are successful. But be warned that the internet is littered with failed businesses which failed to get their message to potential users. There are Billions of people out there logging into these social media websites daily and your business only needs to strike a chord with a small proportion of them to succeed beyond your wildest dreams. It is therefore advisable to use professionals.
Softline solutions are experts in creating Social Media campaigns. Talk to them!
