Dallas Business Consultant Elijah ClarkDallas Business Consultant Elijah Clark

Social Media

The development of the internet has created challenges for businesses who fail to grow with the technology or properly manage social media. Social media has opened a door for customers to express their concerns to or about companies and this method of communication gives customers the power of opinion and change. Customers are a significant factor in generating brand awareness for businesses. This is due to users promoting the brand as well as creating content and exposure through social comments, questions, and answers on forum boards and social media profiles.

Because of technology and social media, the customer has the power to help improve and enrich business activities as well as add value to brands. Considering customers are paramount to the success of your business, your marketing strategies must move away from traditional transactional marketing to facilitator marketing. Facilitator marketing focuses on sharing knowledge with your customers and being open to the opinions of your customers. This method will assist in promoting positive sales and satisfied customers.

Social Media Reviews

Online networking is a gathering of internet-based applications built on the foundation of ideology and technical specifications of web 2.0, which allows for the development and exchange of user-generated content. Social media is a critical area of enthusiasm for marketing managers and practitioners seeking to evaluate and influence customers’ perceptions. Researchers found that 88% of marketers used social media and spent over $60 billion per year consistently on social media marketing. The most valuable social media tools for gathering marketing data are LinkedIn®, Twitter, Facebook, and online blogging.[1] The essential marketing applications of social media include content marketing, market research, and business networking.

Your business should use social media for presenting marketing endeavors and building relationships with customers. Having an influential social presence is critical to propelling your marketing and brand development strategies. Increasing knowledge, implementing social media strategies, and brand showcasing can benefit your business by exploiting the opportunities that social networks present. In conducting a study consisting of 236 social media users’ online interactions to evaluate predictors relating to social media sites, it was found that online networking had a significant effect on customers’ perceptions of online marketing and advertisements.[2]

In a large-scale field experiment comprising of 45,000 participants of an online mall, researchers found that both financial and value incentives were significant forces in generating brand awareness through social members.[3] If you grasp how to capitalize from online discussions, you can develop strategies that enhance your business’s reputation, profits, and brand awareness. Social influence is characterized as a propensity to accept data as evidence about reality. For instance, with online movie ratings, customers frequently rate movies based on previous ratings by other customers. This happens because customers using social media have a significant influence on the actions and suppositions of their peer groups.

The advantage of using social media for your business is to connect with those customers who can decidedly influence your brand’s notoriety and awareness. For an individual to be influential on social media, they need to present relevant substance within their reviews and have a reasonable social following. You could gain influential power by identifying, reaching, and bargaining with customers online. To develop these relationships of power, you should solicit influential customers and provide product samples and ask that they share their evaluations and feedback on social networks.

 

[1] Whiting, A., & Williams, D. (2013). Why people use social media: A uses and gratifications approach. Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, 16, 362-369. doi:10.1108/qmr-06-2013-0041

[2] Vinerean, S., Cetina, I., Dumitrescu, L., & Tichindelean, M. (2013). The effects of social media marketing on online consumer behavior. International Journal of Business and Management, 8, 66. doi:10.5539/ijbm.v8n14p66

[3] Ahrens, J., Coyle, J. R., & Strahilevitz, M. A. (2013). Electronic word of mouth: The effects of incentives on e-referrals by senders and receivers. European Journal of Marketing, 47, 1034-1051. doi:10.1108/03090561311324192

Internet and Social Trends

The development of the internet has shifted businesses from paper-based and people-intensive purchasing frameworks toward electronic frameworks. In 2016, U.S. electronic commerce transactions accounted for $394.86 billion (11.7%) of total retail sales.[1] Online sales have seen a significant growth because of the internet. The progression of the internet and technology will continually add value to business and customer relationships and provide material for future marketing research.

Customers are moving toward the internet to develop knowledge, business insights, and for other personal reasons. Research has shown that businesses that utilize traditional marketing techniques and advertising methods have seen a decrease in revenue because consumers are moving online to search for businesses and make purchases. Considering the exceptional growth of the internet, businesses without a viable marketing strategy embracing the internet witnessed a lack of marketing effectiveness, product sales, and brand awareness. To counter the effects of the interpersonal communication that the internet presents, your business should obviously develop strategic marketing communication for targeting internet-based customers.

Using the internet to gather information aids in collecting pertinent data for better comprehending the perceptions of your customers toward your business. Given the development of the internet, you can utilize technology for storing and accumulating customer information. Likewise, because of the significant influence of the internet, you can also use the internet to help with establishing relationships with business partners and customers.

The internet affects individuals in their daily lives and can produce challenges for your business due to the accessibility of social media. Online networking has revealed an entryway for customers to express their concerns directly to your business, and this method of correspondence encourages interaction between your business and your customers. Subsequently, customers appreciate having their sentiments validated. However, the immediate and open forum of communication could present challenges for your business if you are not prepared to manage and grow with the online trend.

Customers have a significant influence on the brand awareness of your business as the opinions of customers can propel your brand reputation. For instance, inquiries, comments, and reactions on discussion boards often affect brand loyalty, social following, and purchasing habits. Given the internet, you have to carefully monitor your brand, public activities, and reputation if you want to stay ahead of customer concerns and problems that could impact your sales and business growth.

 

[1] https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2017/02/17/us-e-commerce-sales-grow-156-2016/

Social Brand Development

As humans, one of the ways we build relationships is through the stories we tell; why else do we catch up with our friends, right? In business, it’s no different. You want to create moments between your business and your customers. Those willing to share the experiences of their founders, customers, and staff can reap the many benefits that storytelling offers. It shifts the focus a little from what you do and talks about why you do it. The story of your brand is as individual as you are, and it needs to tell your audience who you are and why you’re doing what you do. It is where your manifesto comes to life, giving your audience context for your business and a chance to connect with what is important to you. After all, people buy from people.

Your brand is often your business’s most valuable asset. A strong brand can generate loyal customers and positive sales. The brand should be seen by customers as both positive and valuable. For your brand to be valuable to customers, it needs to simplify the decision-making process and reduce any perceived risk for your customers.

Social Media Branding. The personalized brand for your business should include a presentation of your unique benefits, knowledge, experience, and expertise that help make your business memorable. These unique assets influence customers to make a purchase and professionals to want to work with your brand. To expand brand awareness, start by creating, or cleaning up, your online presence and social media pages. On your social media pages, you should not post or subscribe to anything that does not enhance your brand. This includes both text and images. In addition to social media pages, you should create digital image galleries and a website showcasing the best of your brand.

Social Media Marketing Plan – Case Study

Whether you want to call it social media or Web 2.0, businesses have started joining into one of the fastest growing industries around. A survey by McKinsey & Company shows that nearly 1,700 businesses show that using Web 2.0 technologies have lead to increased conversions, successful marketing strategies, increased communication and the ability to provide better products.

“The most often-reported business benefits of Web 2.0 are a greater ability to share ideas, improved (and faster) access to knowledge experts, and reduced costs of communication, travel, and operations. (Chartier, 2009)”

Social media marketing

social media marketing plan should be aimed at creating an online presence within the micro-blogging networks such as Facebook and Twitter for your company.

By using an online platform such as Twitter and Facebook, it will allow for your company to promote the company name by blogging updates about the company as well as interact with followers and subscribers.

Along with blogging, other benefits of using a social media platform are:

  • Video updating and posting of commercials
  • Photos of events your company may have attended and posting new portfolio pieces
  • Discussion – allowing followers to ask questions directly from these platforms.
  • Link placement – adding back-links to texdesignstudio.com
  • Networking – allows for interacting with current and potential customers.

Facebook stats:

  • More than 350 million active users.
  • 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day.
  • More than 35 million users update their status each day.
  • More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook.
  • Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans.
  • Average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook (Facebook, 2010).

Twitter stats:

  • Total audience of roughly 18 million registered users.
  • Users are averaging 27.3 million tweets per day.
  • Annual run rate of 10 billion tweets (Ostrow, 2009).

Along with advertising your company for free using social media platforms, it will also allow for users to interact from their mobile devices.

Facebook and Twitter are also pushed as services that can and should be used through mobile devices. “Twitter users are more likely to use their cell phones to go online than the overall online population (Cheng, 2006).”

There are currently more than 65 million active users accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.

Knowing this will allow your company to further market to these users on their mobile devices as well as these social platforms. These users are also more likely to subscribe to syndicated feeds and text message advertising.

Our Audience:

Example: CompanyEC currently has a target audience of 18 years of age and above, and college graduates that have an income of $30k or above.

Quantcast user statistics:

Twitter:

  • 88% of Twitter users are 18 years and above in age.
  • 80% have a $30k and above income.
  • 55% are college graduates.

Facebook:

  • 79% of Facebook users are 18 years and above in age.
  • 84% have a $30k and above income.
  • 55% are college graduates.

Understanding the Audience

In order to better understand user response to this new marketing plan, we will provide users with a survey on texdesignstudio.com, which will ask questions regarding how and if they use these platforms.

  • Are they are interested in receiving news and discount updates from CompanyEC on these social platforms.
  • Do they currently follow CompanyEC on these platforms?

Twitter and Facebook currently make it simple for users to follow or become fans of users. If we add a “become a friend” widget on texdesignstudio.com, users can simply click on the widget and will instantly become a fan of CompanyEC’s facebook profile.

By adding a “follow us on Twitter” widget, users can click that widget and instantly start following CompanyEC with their Twitter profiles.

These platforms are relatively easy for any user to sign up with and start receiving updates within a few minutes. Users can link to CompanyEC’s profile and share with their friends on their own profiles.

CompanyEC will use these platforms to provide customers with article updates, blogs, discounts, and portfolio updates.

User Participation

Users will interact by contributing to articles and responding to blogs and other news and images that CompanyEC post within these platforms.

Marketing on these social platforms will allow CompanyEC to post information on corporate accomplishments and distribution of links that take users to corporate websites, promotional sites and other press release pages.

Social media user benefits:

  • Offer ‘insider’ discounts, specials and other values to followers only.
  • Participating in online social media groups will allow for CompanyEC to build a more personal relationship with past and potential customers.
  • Allows for quick access for customers to ask questions.

Being that texdesignstudio.com is written using a Joomla platform, we will be able to integrate it with Facebook and Twitter with little effort. By creating and adding a plug-in into this website, the content on these social platforms will automatically update once the website is updated by using the Application Programming Interface (API) provided by Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook and Twitter also have their own plugins that integrate with one another so that if information on one platform is updated, it will also update the other automatically.

Metrics

Google Analytics will help to show which platform users are linking from, how they explore the website and how visitor experiences can be enhanced. With this information, CompanyEC will have an improved return on investment, increase conversions and ultimately make more money on the web.

Tracking Users:

  • Allows for seeing how effective or ineffective the platforms are.
  • Which customer and customer segments are most valuable.
  • Which social media platform visitors are coming from and what they do on the website.
  • Will help to see what users like and dislike by analyzing bounce rate and time on website.
  • Which pages resonate with prospects and lead to conversions.

With using this metrics system we will also be able to get a better understanding of what site content users are most interested in and find out how effective our current content is.

 

Credits

Facebook (2010). Statistics. Retrieved January 29, 2010, from http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

Ostrow, A. (2009). How many people actually use twitter? Retrieved January 29, 2010, from http://mashable.com/2009/04/28/twitter-active-users/

Cheng, J. (2006). Twitter users are mobile, urban, and engaged online. Retrieved January 29, 2010, from http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/02/study-twitter-users-are-mobile-urban-and-engaged-online.ars

Quantcast. (2010). Twitter.com monthly traffic. Retrieved January 29, 2010, from http://www.quantcast.com/twitter.com

Perez, S. (2009). 4 ways companies use twitter for business. Retrieved January 29, 2010, from http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/03/4-ways-companies-use-twitter-for-business.php

Chartier, D. (2009). McKinsey: businesses reaping benefits from web 2.0. Retrieved January 29, 2010, from http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2009/09/mckinsey-businesses-reaping-benefits-from-web-20.ars

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