Social Media for Business
Social Media is the current "hot marketing topic" and rightly so, and there are many opportunities that businesses can take advantage of to increase their online visibility, reinforce credibility and, ultimately, to deliver enquiries leading to new sales. There are more than 350 different social networks and it's true that the top 6 have grown phenomenally over the past couple of years, Facebook has more than 1.4 billion users, LinkedIn has over 330 million and Twitter nearly 300 million for example. However, it's not simply a case of signing up and waiting for hundreds, thousands or even millions to beat a path to your door - you have to invest time to get it working and continue to invest time to keep it working. You also need to understand which sites are used by your customers and how they like to use them. Although it's not advertising in the traditional sense it's not unlike traditional marketing. After all, you wouldn't advertise in The Sun if your market were all Telegraph readers - would you? And yet I talk to businesses on a weekly basis who have yet to grasp this and wonder why the time they are putting in to their social media isn't paying off for them.