Good morning, Social Rabbit here with your guide to the world of social media.
13 reasons social media works is responding my the post 13 excuses for social media not working, I can’t really give you 13 excuses and let you loose on the world, so here are the responses with facts and figures to back it up, no more excuses people!
1) No Time… All it takes is an hour a day, as this article shows you how… 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening
2) Facebook fan pages don’t work for my industry. Facebook pages are used by a huge number of different industries out there (I don’t want to say all, as I haven’t checked to be honest!). There are case studies on Movie releases, Police stations, Charities, cafes, non-profits, restaurants, pizza places, small businesses, it’s not just products, but services as well. As a service you can promote special offers, position your business as an expert and use your fans as a mini focus group.
3) It’s a fad. Nope, NO. Facebook has been around since 2004, MySpace since 2003 and 6/7 years on they are still growing, as well as other social networks. The advertising spend on TV and print is decreasing and companies are moving to online. Groundswell blogs that social networks will be like ‘air’ in five years time. It’s not going anywhere.
4) No one I know uses it. This is hard to believe, 400 million people on Facebook globally and growing, LinkedIn has 60 million professionals on it. People are using it in their personal life, and they ar using it to talk to companies. Go and ask your clients/customers, I bet more than you think are using it.
5) My friend tried it and it didn’t work for their business. Social media is not a shoe you try on and everyone loves it, you have to build it to suit your audience. You need to look at your audience, how old they are, what they are interested in and use this info to engage them in your social media. It is not a one size fits all approach, look at what has worked for similar businesses in your industry.
6) People where I live don’t use it. Check out this link, it will show all the countries globally where people are using Facebook, and that is just one social network. Unless you are living on the Moon it’s very very very unlikely that no one is using social media. I have just checked and astronauts have been using Twitter on their space trips since 2007! If you are interested here is their Facebook page.
7) I have no idea what to do. This is a lazy excuse. There is so much information on the internet you could read about it for weeks and still not get through it all. Good starting points are looking at the Mashable website (also available as an iPhone app) and do a search for what you want, you can also find events on here. Check out the Social Rabbit Facebook page, as there are resources on there. I could talk about this for hours, but a good place to start is to ask someone, even Rabbit’s are friendly!
I will take too long to learn. Easy answer – outsource it! Obviously Social Rabbit can help, but there are also lots of people out there that specialise in social media. Just talk to them about what they have achieved for previous clients, and maybe even chat to past clients before you jump in.
9) A Facebook page does not mean sales increase. True, if all you do is create a page and wait for people to come along, because I can tell you right now that ain’t going to happen. One page I have just started to work on – BodyBolster, has had 18 fans since June 2009, they hired Social Rabbit this week, and overnight we doubled their fans to 36. The secret to this is actually talking about the page and updating content!
10) Only geeks use Twitter. OK, harsh I know, but it depends on your definition of geek, is Ashton Kutcher a geek (he has the largest number of followers on Twitter with 4.6 million),or what about Oprah with 3.2 million followers. Or Dell computers making $3 million from sales directly related to Twitter, or Best Buy electronics store in the USA using it for customer service. I would say Twitter users are clever enough to know where their audience are and to engage with them.
11) People in my industry are not computer literate. It’ all about education, social media is like email was when it first started, it took while for everyone to get it but now people can’t imagine a world without it.
12) Who’s interested in us? The world is changing, people want to deal with people, not faceless companies. People like the reassurance that comes with knowing the people in the company – they want to connect with them.
13) There’s no point changing how we communicate. That’s fine, but your audience are moving into social media, so if you don’t look at it for your business you are going to miss the boat. Think about how frustrating it is when a company you deal with doesn’t use a certain technology that would save you time, they probably said it’s just a fad, no point in changing, so what would you do? Move to another company that offers what you want – You don’t want that to happen to you.
Hopefully this has helped you understand why social media is such a ‘hot potato’ at the moment. I would love to hear your thoughts, just click on the add a comment link below.
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