Social media has already become the next big thing, and companies both here in Cornwall and worldwide are making haste to jump on the bandwagon and make sure they don't miss out.
For most there is as yet no clear strategy for how they will achieve tangible rewards from Social Media, though the few siren calls that they have the keys to the Social Media Safe seem to be sufficient to keep new users jumping in at the rate of a few million per day.
In this article we aim to take a quick look at the leading Social Media sites, and also give a little information about what is available for businesses wanting to make full use of Social Media in Cornwall.
But firstly lets just jump ahead of all the hype, and remember why you got a web site. In most cases (for a business at least) its because you want to use it to sell more, then perhaps there are still a few who had a site "because they had to", which seems to us at Channel Computing to be something of a missed opportunity!
And to sell more your site will need both:
- More visitors
- The ability to somehow convert those visitors to customers, or at least prospects.
So to deal with these, More Visitors will almost inevitably come from search engines, and that means Google in the majority of cases (increasing your visitors from search engines is called SEO - Search Engine Optimisation). So if that's where most of your visitors are going to come from, why focus on anything else?
The ability to convert visitors to customers is the second important ingredient, and the parts of the site that are going to help achieve this include things such as the quality of your headlines and sales copy, your credibility and testimonials, how well you identify with your visitors needs (fix the pain is one way of describing this), the clarity of your sales process and whether or not your call to action is compelling.
So back to Social Media - where did it fit in to all this?
Well perhaps it doesn't exactly, so here's the rub - is all the Social Media hype just a massive distraction away from the real business of marketing your site? Perhaps the answer is yes AND no!
- There definitely are examples of companies generating real traffic and sales using Social Media Marketing.
- We've done it ourselves: receiving high quality contacts who become customers through Social Media Channels.
- Then there's the fun of the interaction, but that's not business - its pleasure.
- Next there's the thought that Social Media is growing at a phenomenal rate, so it must become truly useful soon.
The real key to Social Media are that you set up the right strategy for you, you automate what you sensibly can (without ending up with a production line approach that could easily alienate your social circle), and that like SEO or any other aspect of Internet marketing, you stick with it for long enough to give it a chance to pay dividends.
So on to strategy - out of the main Social Media sites or channels, which should you choose? Well the choice is bewildering, to name just a few there are Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Linked-In, eCademy, Friendfeed, Plaxo, Bebo, our own fledgling Inkahoot, groups sits might qualify such as Yahoo or Google Groups, Ning, and so on - the choice is almost endless. Of course most of us just stop at facebook for friends and family, but the others particularly Twitter and Linked-In seem to be in massively increasing use among businesses here in Cornwall, with Twitter growing at over 750% worldwide in 2008, and Facebook passing 200 million users this year.
So you can be sure there are going to be people out on those networks - but are any of them listening for you?
Now that depends mostly on the quality of what you have to offer, and your regularity and persistence in making those offerings, in order to build up a user community of a size that could make a difference.
How could you find out more about Social media Marketing in Cornwall?
We run regular training courses on internet marketing, and these not only teach you how to strategies to make the most effective use of Social Media, but also where it fits into the rest of your Internet marketing mix - particularly how it can interact with your web site, your SEO, and other aspects of your business development on line.
We would also recommend hooking up with us on some of the Social Networks, I can be found on Twitter (http://twitter.com/gravesie), Linked In (www.linkedin.com/in/petergraves), eCademy (www.ecademy.com/user/petergraves1), Digg (digg.com/users/gravesie), Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/gravesie), I could go on.
One particularly effective part of Social Media is the formation and growth of user groups of like-minded people, and these can be one of the most effective ways of engaging with people online who are looking for what you do. We set up a Cornwall Business networking group on Linked-In (you would need to be logged in to linked in to Join), which has taken on a bit of a life of its own, and there a numerous other groups dedicated to every topic under the sun, including of course those of you who might want to learn about Social Media.
There's a lot more to talk about in Social Media and we'll be taking on the major topics one at a time, but for now I would suggest that you get logged on to one or two, search out your friends and a few people of interest, and try to make the effort to send out a few messages so people get used to hearing from you, and you will have made a positive start to your Social Media Marketing career!
