Use of Social Media

Nowadays atrracting customers needs a very different mindset. The days of ‘push’ marketing or ‘hunting style’ marketing; cold calling, door to door visits etc.. have gone. The ’customer centric business’ will stand the test of time. People are now better protected in terms of filtering calls and emails and more educated – they do not like feeling they are being sold to.

Social Media allows you, as a business, to get a chat going with a potential customer, educate them and then when an interest has been expressed – follow it up.

We asked a few questions to determine the survey participants’ experience using social media to market their businesses.

Use of Social Media We began by simply asking marketers if they use Social Media to market their businesses. The overwhelming majority (93%) indicated they were employing Social Media for marketing purposes.
Social Media is important for my business A significant 90% of marketers said that Social Media was important to their Businesses.
Age factor There’s a direct relationship between age and time spent on social media. The younger the marketer, the more time he or she spends on Social Media. People aged 20 to 29 years spend more time than other age groups using social media marketing (with 41% spending 11+ hours weekly), followed by 30- to 39-year-olds (37% spending 11+ hours per week). This is an increase over our 2010 study.

Benefits of Social Media

The number1 benefit of Social Media is standing out in an increasingly noisy world. A significant 88% of all marketers indicated that their Social Media efforts have generated more exposure for  Improving traffic and subscribers was the second major benefit, with 72% reporting positive results.
Nearly two-thirds of marketers indicated a rise in search engine rankings was a benefit of Social Media.  As search engine rankings improve, so will business exposure and lead generation efforts, and overall marketing expenses will decrease.

Slightly more than half of marketers found Social Media generated qualified leads.

Commonly used social media tools

There are over 10,000 Social Media directories but Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs are the top four social media tools used by marketers, with Facebook leading the pack.