In the ancient times (before the last 5 years) when you wanted to talk with someone — say, your client — you picked up the phone and you spoke to him. Now it’s social media!It’s so easy today, Social Media is the perfect tool to build relationships. It works. And yes, it can be fun.
Today, 79% of corporations use Social Media to interact with consumers. They use these communications to maintain top-of-mind presence, drive sales, get feedback, and award customer-loyalty.
In many large organizations there are entire departments of tweeters and social media mavens, sending out tweets, blogs, text messages and checking in with Friends on FaceBook and folks in various interest groups.
On the other hand, if you are like many busy people today (who don’t have a support staff of thousands), maybe you want to write your own material, then have a trusted associate distribute it and respond on your behalf.
Why are these firms devoting so much energy and resources to this effort?
Because it works!
Properly executed, social media does indeed help with online presence. A well-written blog, delivered regularly, builds community. Social Media does drive sales. Social Media supplements—not replaces—your other marketing efforts.
The Altimeter Group cites that there are 600M (600,000,000) Facebook accounts and these 600M folks spend an incredible 700B (7,000,000,000) minutes per month on Facebook. Twitter is second with 175M users sending about 95M tweets a day. My calculator can’t even figure out what this comes to on a monthly basis. Anyway, LinkedIn is third at 85M users. YouTube is another social biggie, but not quite in the same way.