Social media marketing is an important tool in your business marketing strategy, and if you’re not connected you absolutely need to be. Here are three reasons why.
1. Your customers are talking about you.
Whether you are connected on Facebook or Twitter, etc., your customers are, and they are talking about your business. Why? Because for the first time ever, social media has leveled the playing field so that customers have a voice, and with that voice comes power.
Statistics show that an unhappy customer tells 11 people about their bad experience with a business. But that was before social media. I personally have over 5,000 followers on Twitter, and 600 friends on Facebook, not to mention hundreds of followers on other social networks. If I’m not happy with a business, I have the ability to get the word out to thousands of people!! Your business needs to be monitoring the social media environment to see what people are saying so that you can respond appropriately and quickly. Here are three of my favorite online tools that you can use to monitor what people are saying about your business: Google Alerts, Addictomatic, and TweetBeep.
2. Customers expect you to be engaged.
Notice I didn’t use the word want, but expect. Social media has become a new platform for customer service, and in order to deliver the best service possible, businesses must respond. If you don’t respond it is assumed you don’t care. And if you don’t care about your customers they won’t care about you. Get engaged.
3. Social media marketing enhances your visibility.
Ivan Misner, the founder of Business Networking International, (BNI) teaches that Visibility + Credibility = Profitability. With over 100 million users of Facebook in the US it’s easy to see why you could be missing out on a huge opportunity for visibility. On top of that, social media results are now indexed by Google, Bing, and Yahoo, which means that your Twitter messages (and your company profile) have a high probability of appearing at the top of Google for specific keyword searches. Get your business on social media so you can get found.
