Social media, as anyone reading this will know, is exploding as the new method of outreach to your customers, it’s a free way of getting your brand in front of potentially millions of eyes and people are spending a lot of time and money perfecting their presence on this free resource.
At first glance that only seems to make a limited amount of sense, why pay to use something that’s free? And once my customers like my brand and our products, so what?
You could be interacting with your fans as much as is humanly possible and only really making a few conversions. So what on Earth is the point of directing your customers to like you on Facebook rather than your home page when you produce advertising in traditional sales and marketing material? Why have your customers go somewhere else instead of your shop?
It appears that 93% of businesses have a Facebook account and there are more Facebook users than could comfortably be contained in a single continent if you put them all together. You can’t get that kind of global reach using traditional marketing models unless you have billions of dollars to spare and a name like Coke or Kodak, or, indeed, Facebook.
What could you do to your website in order to accurately collect your customers buying habits, their likes and dislikes, their age, sex and location, their relationship status as well as all the other information that’s right there in front of you when your customer becomes your friend or fan on Facebook? They’ve spent millions of dollars doing it so you don’t have to.
Of course you don’t have to collect this data from your customers, service users and business partners, you could buy the information from a third party market research organisation, it’s far from perfect, rarely accurate and very expensive. It also has privacy issues which can invalidate much of the data you’ve acquired meaning that you have little that’s useable in targeting your audience. With Facebook your first party contacts give that information up for free every time they click a like or become a fan.
It’s as simple as anything to add a Facebook ‘like’ button to your page, in fact, webmonkey described it as being “Damn easy” as it only involves copying and pasting two lines of code. It’s an easy in and it doesn’t take a great deal of know how. The next step is interfacing with Facebook so that people can log into your website using their Facebook API. That’s a little more difficult but in doing so you can collect vast amounts of data as described above and that’s some pretty tasty CRM right there. Not only do you get all that information you get to see who the friends of your visitor are, a little data on them depending on their privacy setting and they’re all informed when your primary visitor likes and friends you. If each Facebook user has an average of 150-200 friends your brand is shown them when one person likes you. Now Facebook isn’t just an outreach tool for your company any longer, it’s a consumer research tool offering data collection and consumer demographics from first parties that could barely be dreamed of 5 years ago.
And that’s why, if you still had any doubts, why you should be improving your social media activities and doing it right now.
Dan Cash is planning his spa holidays this year. The choice is some Bali spa holidays or Caribbean. OR maybe stay at home and eat icecreams. So many decisions..
Related articles
- What’s Not To Like About How You Tackle Social Media? (freepersonalizedtshirts.com)
- The Top 5 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make on Facebook and How You Can Avoid Them (capturedtech.com)
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