How Social Media Is The Face Of Your Business

We come from an advertising background, so we’re never going to say advertising is passé. Instead, added to that matrix is the loud clatter of social media. If you think about it, social media is a marketer’s dream for the following reasons:

  • Users follow you because they are interested in your company, product or service.
  • Users are mostly a captive audience, with information about your company being directly delivered to their feed without much cost.
  • It’s most often mixed in with personal social content, and many users confuse the two (yes, that’s what we want).
  • It’s highly interactive, and the best part: It’s hosted by someone else.
  • It’s easy to share, and if viral enough, will be shared by users to other users without your involvement (yes, we want that too).

Having said all that, imagine what your users will see if you haven’t fully delivered a quality promise statement in your post: Your users think that your company or product is equally not of quality, and therefore your message backfires. It’s very important that companies deliver the highest quality message possible. For that, it’s best to hire a professional with a sound strategy, a creative approach to execution on a small budget, and with really great resources.

Social Media: Facebook

Facebook is at the center of social media interaction and marketing. There are two things that make Facebook a true tool for marketing awareness:

1) Facebook supports all elements of media marketing (video, sound, images, posts, check-ins, music) that allows users market products in a variety of ways that are built-in to the platform. This service is free to all users, even business.

2) It has been in development for almost 10 years, and has become a trusted brand with consumers.

facebook

With over 1 billion users, the reach is substantial. The secret to reaching a large user base is to create compelling content that will be shared amongst users. Compelling content is probably not shot with an iPhone with little to no planning.

Social Media: Instagram

At one time Instagram was a service on its own, but now is officially a part of Facebook. It still runs independently, however, and users can still have an Instagram account even if they don’t have a Facebook account.

instagram

Instagram was developed as a photo-sharing service that also includes links and and comments. Within a year they had developed a means to also platform 15 second user videos with sound.

From a marketing perspective, Instagram is killer. Because it’s ‘bite-sized’ media, users can get quick messages and imagery in their feed without feeling overwhelmed as they might on Facebook. Since users are expecting content to be short and sweet, they are more likely to view it, knowing it will be a short-time investment. That’s 15 seconds to capture user’s attention with a clever video or a memorable graphic about your service or product.

Social Media: Twitter

Twitter is a small social media platform that started out allowing users to broadcast short 140 character messages. It has since developed into a full-scale media broadcast network, featuring text, video animation and images.

twitter

Twitter currently has over 307 million users actively tweeting, so the market is immense. 141 million of them are Americans. 340 million tweets are sent every single day.

The marketing implications of this are enormous. Twitter, as with Instagram and Facebook are a somewhat captive and relevant market. Users typically follow content of interest to them, and in doing so see updated feeds from other users that are specific to those interests.

Twitter is great to use in coordination with other social media platforms, as well as on its own. Twitter feeds can be copied and pasted in other media easily, and are often retweeted, which is a method of sharing a broadcasted feed to another user’s feed.

With that much focus on relevant content, the Twittersphere cannot be ignored for marketing and advertising strategy.

Social Media: SoundCloud

SoundCloud is a relatively newcomer to the social media platform market. It currently has over 140 million active listeners, making it one of the fastest growing and largest social media markets in use.

SoundCloud is really a music and audio streaming site, with a fairly cool user-follow backend. Users place their sound files to be heard up on SoundCloud, use tags to draw users to their uploads, and a robust tracking system (for premium users) to catalogue the most popular streams and downloads.

soundCloud

We're mentioning SoundCloud because as an emerging platform and technology, there aren't many enterprise-level marketers taking advantage of this new player yet. Because of this, massive opportunities abound for marketers that are able to capitalize on this huge growth market.

There are dozens of ways marketers could, and we'd be happy to explain that to anyone that has interest in helping them market their products.

SoundCloud is free, but also has a premium layer that allows users to upload as much content as they want, and track metrics of their listeners and followers.

Social Media: YouTube

For video and video sharing, nothing beats YouTube in both quality and traffic. We use YouTube more than any other network and social media platform. The reason is a simple one: it's a free, high-quality means to push out video to over a billion users worldwide. That's a lot of eyes on your video marketing message.

youtube

There are several ways to slice YouTube for revenue. Many advertisers and marketers use it simply to host the video content of their clients.

Others run ads on content and collect advertising revenue via Google Adsense from their ads hosted by themselves and on other platforms such as Facebook.

Still others make a career out of custom content from a YouTube channel. There are several articles out lately about young YouTubers making not only a living but millions off their YouTube videos.

We love the YouTube integration method, as well. You can almost put a YouTube video anywhere, including as the background for other sites, as we have done here.