
An underlying fact is that more than 80% of people today have at least one social media account. As of 2019, the number of users of social media accounts has surged to 3.4 billion. There is a significant amount of awareness among businesses and the marketing community that these platforms are pivotal in success. As a part of the process of continuous improvement, marketers are continually trying to communicate and keep them engaged with the company. Social media marketing is never constant. There is constant change that occurs due to the never-ending demands of customers, their tastes and preferences, availability of products, and finally, the marketing budget. As 2020 has already started, organizations and marketers have chalked out their strategies in this space, and everyone needs to look at some of the ways by which you can improve the efficacy of around social media management.
Here are four ways by which you can improve upon your sales, engagement rate, and subscriber count using social media.
Develop A Community
It is estimated that users spend an average of two hours and thirty minutes on social media daily. Now it goes without saying that when people are accessing sites lie Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and they will be sharing their interests, likes, and dislikes with other people who share common grounds. These are done through comments, sharing of posts, etc. However, when it comes to businesses, we hardly see people engaging in business social media pages. Hence, it is even more important for marketers to create groups on common social media platforms. For instance, Facebook has a feature called Facebook Groups that helps to build a community platform. Businesses can create a page and then a group and link these two. Subsequently, they can invite their connections to come and be a part of this group, thereby allowing people who share similar interests to collaborate and communicate. As a business owner, you also get an opportunity to promote your services, indirectly, through posts, messages, and blog share.
Focus on Customer Service
Customer service is critical for a plethora of reasons. It helps in delivering a seamless experience to your customer and helps him or her to use the product or service that you have sold quickly. Subsequently, it helps in developing customer personas by collecting valuable information. It also allows an opportunity to understand the pain points of the customer and address them proactively. This can be achieved only through a robust customer service mechanism.
Collaborate with Micro-Influencers
In the field of social media management, it is essential to work with influencers. These are a segment of people who have a huge fan-following, probably in thousands or even millions. Organizations have started to put a strong emphasis on micro-influencers, because the normal ones may not be able to reach to a niche community. Normal influencers have a set of followers who are based on certain perceptions and interests. However, when it comes to reaching a particular set of the target audience, micro-influencers are far more effective. There is another set of influencers called nano influencers who collaborate and work on specific subjects.
Engagement through time-bound events
Finally, all this boils down to one key element, customer engagement. If you want to ensure that your customers care retained, and they come back to you, keep them engaged through specific activities and events, which are time-bound and have a particular item or action to be performed by the customer. This way, your customers stay loyal to you, and you can expect a repeat purchase/business from them.
Let us accept the fact that social media has completely changed our lives dramatically. Right from the way we take care of our daily interaction with our family and friends to the way we receive insights in the form of news, social media is practically in all aspects of our life.
Since the year 2004, social media has seen exponential growth, and today it is at its crescendo. However, the most important question here is that is it worth for businesses to invest in social media? Should social media be a part of the marketing focus in the year 2020?
Here are a few statistics that should help businesses make a decision.
- Global Daily Active Social Media Users are 3.5billion as of 2019. That is 45% of the world population
- Facebook is still the most popular social media platform and the market leader; around 68% to be more specific
- From a generation point of here is a breakup of usage of social media across three main generation types
- 48.2% of social media users are Baby Boomers
- GenX was 77.5% of global social media users
- Millennials accounted for the maximum where around 91% of them were on social media
- If you look at a per day spend on social media, the number comes to a staggering 3 hours on an average
- For businesses, this is intriguing, as around 54% of social media users use the platform for looking out for products.
Source: Survey done by Emarketer, GlobalWebIndex, Buffer, and Pewinternet
These stats should be an eye-opener for many businesses, and if they are not on social media, they are missing out on a massive chunk of their potential customers. Companies need to leverage this channel. Social media is all about connecting, communicating, and collaborating with your target audience. It needs to be done effectively and can be achieved when the four points mentioned above are executed in the best possible way.