Why Should businesses use Social Media
Chris Wood our social media and digital marketing specialist explains why businesses should use social media.
Chris Wood our social media and digital marketing specialist takes a look at how social media has changed, with its use being tripled since 2007.
The use of social media is continuing to grow as these stats show;
- 72% of UK adults and 93% of young adults (16 to 24) have at least one social media profile.
- Facebook is still the No.1 platform with 36 million UK accounts and a fifth of its users go on it 10 times a day.
- Twitter has over 10 million UK accounts and 1 in 4 of these accounts are active every day.
- LinkedIn has over 10 million UK accounts and has quadrupled its user based since 2010.
- Young adults using social media;
- 97% Facebook
- 40% Twitter
- 36% Snap Chat
- 35% Instagram
- 32% YouTube.
- High increase in use of tablets and smartphones. Smartphones have overtaken laptops for getting online and therefore its now key to be online friendly.
Social media for businesses
This continues to make social media a great medium to reach out to many people, whether you’re business to business, business to consumer or non-profit. What you put in place today will last for the foreseeable future as the use of these social media platforms is only growing.
What is changing is how they’re used – much more visual based content, videos and informative content – blogs, articles, reports etc. is being pushed out via these platforms. It’s also important to ensure it complements other marketing and communication activities as this will help improve performance of using social media.
Social media should also form part of a content and inbound marketing strategy. Often when people visit a new website they rarely take action on first visit, normally at least second or several visits. Many people research online before they buy – it’s reported up to 10 websites they check. Thus you need to have informative content that draws people into your business and becomes part of their decision making process. This kind of content is ideal to push out via social media and people will follow you for this, helping them to build trust with your business before deciding whether to buy. Your followers are also more likely to share this kind of content to their followers, thus increasing your reach beyond your own followers.
Digital advertising via social media is also growing as you can effectively target your customer base by location, age, interests etc. Often much more cost effectively compared to say traditional marketing, where you have the cost of producing leaflets, flyers, newspaper and magazine ads etc. and then having them distributed.
As part of our social media courses we show how to best use these platforms (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) for business. How it influences your Google ranking as Google likes to see hits from social media platforms to your website, known as social signals.
As well as how to save time in using social media via dashboard applications like Hootsuite that allow you to post to more than one platform, schedule messages and several other key features. We also show you how to effectively run social media advertising campaigns and track the impact of social media.
Internet & Social Media Training
Our next Internet and social media training course is taking place on 18th March.
Our course is ideal for businesses or individuals who are aware of social media but don’t know how it could benefit their business or organisation. After attending this course, you will have gained an excellent understanding of how to use social media to meet your business or organisation objectives.
If you would like more information or to book onto our Internet and Social Media course please contact us on 01392 824 022 or email info@amesolutions.co.uk