Social Sleuth – The Endless Opportunities of Social Media!
Social media – it’s got everyone talking – literally. Changing the way business is done today, social media is bringing brands and organisations closer to their target markets than ever before. Be where the conversation is, that’s what social media is all about. Conversations are happening right now and it’s up to businesses to be a part of those.
Looking at the latest statistics in Social Media from this January 2016 – the numbers speak for themselves:
Facebook has reached 15 million users in Australia. That’s 62.5% of the entire Aussie population engaged, open and ready to learn more about what interests them online.
There are reportedly 3.7 million users on LinkedIn – and being the platform of choice for professionals – it’s the perfect way to connect with candidates, colleagues and experts of a certain industry.
Twitter logs in an approximate 2.8 million Australian users – a ready and engaged audience waiting for news updates and your organisation’s expertise in bite size updates.
According to Sensis (2015) 79% of Australians use the internet every day and 49% of Australia use social media every day.
LOOK AT THE OPPORTUNITIES!
Social media presents a wide variety of opportunities for businesses of all sizes. Here are just a few of them:
Exposure:
Promoting the name of your brand and business social media offers a broad reach capable of accessing millions of people all around the world.
Inform:
Social media enables businesses to tell customers about their goods and services - educating them as to produces, services, industry and the like. Furthermore, businesses may target particular demographics such as age, gender and location.
Learn:
Social media accesses customer thoughts about your specific business communicating on a personal basis with individual consumer groups.
Decreased Costs:
Bouton (2015) states that according to the Society for Human Resource Management individual turnover as a result of poor cultural fit can cost businesses between 50 and 60% of that individual’s salary.
Increased Quality of Candidature:
Logan Hill of Bloomberg Business states ‘Glassdoor’s Dobroski reports that job seekers cite company culture as their second-highest priority, “almost tied with salary”’ (2013).
Increased Employee Retention:
Kruse (2012) further states in his article, ‘employees with lower engagement are four times more likely to leave their jobs than those who are highly engaged’.
Save:
A massive benefit in social media lies in the cost efficiency of operation. Businesses can effectively attract new customers across multiple platforms with much lower costs. This is particularly so in that many forms of social media are free.
Connect:
Businesses may build stronger relationships with consumers through the quick distribution of information to a wide variety of individuals. This allows for both the development and maintenance of relationships with customers via updates and other content sharing.
Recruit:
Many organisations use social media to advertise open positions. Job networking sites like that of LinkedIn are dedicated to the job market helping utilise your networks to attract the top talent available.
SEO:
A website’s ranking in search engine results can be occasionally affected by the size and influence of your social network. As a social following forms and grows visibility in search engine results may too increase. This is especially so in the consistent provision of high quality content (such as articles/blogs) which in creating a web following will result in greater click rates to your website.
STARTING SOCIAL!
There’s a lot to social media to a point where there are entire roles dedicated to devising and managing social content for businesses. With so many platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr etc. where do you start?
Don’t let the sheer size of opportunities overwhelm you. If you’re thinking of getting into or increasing social media start with the basics. While individual businesses do and certainly should have independently suited strategy the first networks businesses should generally focus on are Facebook and LinkedIn.
Facebook:
Being the largest social network available Facebook is a good location to start for any businesses starting out with social media. Facebook business pages offer a platform for businesses to provide regular updates, build up subscribers and engage audiences directly.
With Facebook you create a profile and multiply pages, post links to your blogs or other content and interact with current and potential customers. You may highlight products and/or services, post upcoming special events and even run ads (for a small fee). Your target audience can share your content on their own Facebook accounts and increase exposure by 'Liking' certain posts.
There are numerous guides to the basics of setting up a Business page on Facebook, Hubspot offers a free, informative guide for business here.
LinkedIn:
As we mentioned earlier, LinkedIn is known as “the” professional social media network and is associated with job searching and posting, professional networking and thought leadership.
This network is primarily used by business professionals and benefits B2B companies. Creating a Company Page with LinkedIn provides you with a platform to showcase your business and connect with potential customers and leads.
As with Facebook, there are a plethora of guides to learn the basics of LinkedIn – Hubspot also offers a free, informative guide on LinkedIn for business here.
A SOCIAL SUMMARY
Social media is a forefront for many businesses today. Enabling companies to connect to an impressively large scope of individuals social media is paramount for the delivery of information to consumers. In many ways, social media has changed the face of how business is done.
So, you’ve set up your pages on Facebook and LinkedIn, but now what? Be sure to catch our future blogs, where we delve further into these two networks and share tips on how you can best use them for both employee and candidate engagement.
