YOUR Offline Business Social Media?

Social Media has become a worldwide phenomenon. The growth in usage statistics is staggering across the numerous platforms that make up this online world. In 2022 alone the number of social media users rose by 176 million bringing the total number of active social media users to 2.3 billion..

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Social Media for Offline Businesses

Despite these astonishing statistics, the big question still remains. Does Social Media Belong in Your Business Plan?

The starting point for answering the question “Does social media belong in your business plan?” is the understanding that a business plan is a living, breathing, ever-changing document. It is no secret that too many business owners of small to medium size businesses either don’t develop a business plan at all or if they do, they don’t revisit it periodically to keep it fresh and relevant.

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While social media has existed for some time now, its use for business is a rather recent development. This has come about as a result of its increasing acceptance by the population in general, businesses finding ways to capitalize on it, larger businesses dedicating resources to it and the social media platforms offering more business-oriented capabilities.

Those business owners that are keeping their plans current are likely to already have included it as a consideration. For others, this new technology may force them to dust off their current business plan and take a fresh look from a new perspective.

So how should you incorporate social media into your business plan?

To answer that question, let’s examine some of the key elements of a business plan.

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Market Analysis

Has social media had an impact on the specific industry related to your business?

For example, if you own a restaurant you need to know whether any of these platforms could help you grow your business. In this case, two immediately come to mind - Yelp and Foursquare.

It would be important to be proactive with the use of these platforms in your business planning.

You must keep in mind that tech is not just a ‘young man’s’ game anymore. We’ve about reached that point where you’re no longer surprised to see a grandma on a smartphone.

This means no matter your demographic, they are tech-savvy. It’s why AARP has such a large social media presence. Everyone is online.

Competitive Analysis

In this section of your business plan have you analyzed how your competitors are using social media platforms? For example, do they have a business page on Facebook? Do they use Facebook ads?

Along these same lines, you need to consider how investing in these platforms can help you with your competitive differentiation. How can you use them to make your business stand out from the rest?

It’s a simple way of assessing your needs. Look at other similar businesses and see if they are getting good results from social media. Business can be very collaborative so even if it’s not apparent how good the company’s ROI is, they may happily share it with you. Just please contribute something in return.

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Organization and Management

The use of these technologies requires resources. Consideration needs to be given to whether these will be internal or external.

In addition, social media can provide an effective platform for managing customer service, including issues. It has provided new methods for people to share their opinions about a business and its service.

It is important to follow these developments and pay attention to whether your customers are providing information to their online friends about your business.

Social media also keeps people from asking the same question over and over again. A simple tweet from your company’s social media account may be enough to quell the question of thousands of customers.

Now that’s a good ROI, wouldn’t you agree?

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Marketing and Sales

This is a crucial area for those that decide to dedicate time, energy and money to the use of social media. A focused strategy is critical to the success or you may spend thousands of dollars with little return to show for it.

Consistent messages, attracting people to your products and converting them to customers requires proper business planning for successful execution.

It seems like nearly all sales at least start online. Nearly all of us go online before going in-store. Even just to check the general prices on Amazon. With that said, social media ties in nicely. Market and sell to your customers before they go to anyone else.

Financial

Unfortunately, most owners of small to medium size businesses spend money on online services such as a website that is never going to give them a return on their investment because the site is not likely to be found among the millions of websites that exist today. However, these new platforms can provide very cost effective alternatives for promoting your business.

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New data released by email marketing software provider Yesmail shows that 91 percent of retail brands use two or more social media channels.

Final Thoughts

In summary, the growth of social media indicates that it is here to stay. That doesn’t mean that every platform will survive, however. It is important to periodically review your business plan to ensure that your business is taking advantage of the growth opportunities that social media has to offer.

This doesn’t mean you need to feel responsible for managing these social media campaigns. There are lots of young people who are eager to prove themselves and all you have to do is give them the keys, a modest budget, and watch the magic.

Okay, well, that’s not all there is to do. But those are ingredients that can lead to big results.

So should your business have a social media presence? Probably. No matter who your target demographic. Even if your demographic is children in Africa. Social media is still useful for letting everyone know what your company is doing for those children. Social media is about giving your company a voice. It’s not about pushing products, singing your praises, or posting funny cat meme’s on Friday’s.

Guest Authored By William Lipovsky. William owns the personal finance website First Quarter Finance. His most embarrassing moment was telling a Microsoft executive, "I'll just Google it." Follow William on Twitter.

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So should your business have a social media presence?

Probably. No matter who your target demographic.

Even if your demographic is children in Africa.

Social media is still useful for letting everyone know what your company is doing for those children.

Social media is about giving your company a voice. It’s not about pushing products, singing your praises, or posting funny cat meme’s on Friday’s.

Be there for those you care about..

• 

  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Scottsdale, AZ. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

Global Media Trends YOU Should Know?

Five global social media trends to know..

You’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s been a tough year for social media companies.

Yet it appears that our love of social networking continues unabated.

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Around the world social media usage continues to grow and evolve. New research from GlobalWebIndex suggests one in every three minutes spent online is spent on social media.

Data from comScore found that use of social networks and messaging apps account for more than one quarter of our time on mobile devices.

Here are five key findings from a number of recent reports, which help us to better understand today’s social media landscape:

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1. Social media users worldwide grew by 13 percent last year.

According to data from We Are Social and Hootsuite, more than 4 billion people across the globe now access the internet, with social media being used on a monthly basis by almost 3.2 billion of them.

As Nathan McDonald, co-founder and group CEO at We Are Social, noted when launching their 2018 Global Digital reports:

“Almost 1 million people started using social media for the first time every day over the past year — that’s equivalent to more than 11 new users every second.The global number of people using social media has grown by 13 percent in the past 12 months, with Central and Southern Asia recording the fastest gains (up 90 percent and 33 percent respectively). ”The global penetration of social media stands at 42 percent, compared to 53 percent for the internet as a whole, which suggests there is still room for growth.

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2. Our social and digital media experience is increasingly mobile.

With nine out of every 10 social media users accessing these networks via mobile devices, designing content for handheld devices is essential.

As Ofcom, the U.K.’s communications regulator, showed late last year in their twelfth International Communications Market Report, even in more mature markets such as the U.K., U.S., France and Spain, many of the most popular social networks — including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter — tend to be accessed via mobile, rather than desktop.

Elsewhere, comScore’s 2017 Global Mobile Report, which examined 14 markets (U.S., Canada, U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, China, India, Indonesia and Malaysia) emphasized the predominance of mobile for media consumption.

Moreover, more than one quarter of those surveyed were found to be mobile-only media consumers, rising to 70 percent in India.

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3. The average user has eight different social media accounts.

Just as news organizations and publishers need to cater for social media users on mobile devices, they also need to recognize — and cater to — the fact that consumers access a wide variety of social networks.

On average, GlobalWebIndex found that internet users have eight different social media accounts, almost double the number of accounts as five years ago

Breadth of use was highest in Latin America (averaging of 9.1 networks) and lowest in North America (average 6.6).

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4. Messaging Services are growing faster than traditional networks.

Mary Meeker’s new 2018 Internet Trends report highlighted how messaging apps like WhatsApp, WeChat and Facebook Messenger are growing fast, much faster than traditional social platforms like Instagram and Twitter.

The potential of these platforms — and the wide-ranging functionality found on services like Line, WeChat and KakaoTalk — was identified as a trend to watch by Meeker back in 2015 and again a year later.

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If you want to see where services like Facebook Messenger or Snapchat are heading, then these are apps to watch.

“These platforms — with integrated functionality including eCommerce, calls, texts, stickers and the ability to order both food and taxis — offer a handy one-stop shop for their users,” I wrote back in 2016. “This Sauron-esque UX (“one app to rule them all”) is part of a wider trend that is re-imaging communication.”

The growth of messaging apps, especially in emerging markets, has encouraged news organizations like CNN and the BBC to embrace these platforms. CNN has 4.7 million followers on Japanese messaging app Line, for example, and the BBC was using WhatsApp and WeChat in India as early as 2014.

5. Stories are growing even faster.

To this mix of fast-growing platforms, we must add social video, live video and stories.

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As TechCrunch’s Josh Constine recently wrote:

“WhatsApp’s Stories now have over 450 million daily users. Instagram’s have over 300 million. Facebook Messenger’s had 70 million in September. And Snapchat as a whole just reached 191 million, about 150 million of which use Stories, according to Block Party. With 970 million accounts, it’s the format of the future. Block Party calculates that Stories grew 15 times faster than feeds from the second quarter of  2016 to the third quarter of 2017.

As Block Party, a digital consultancy and full service agency, noted in their report, “Beyond the News Feed: Why Stories Are Becoming the New Face of Social Media,” stories are a format designed for the embedded-camera smartphone era, whereas the origins of the traditional social media feed stem from the desktop era. As the way we consume — and post — to social media becomes increasingly mobile-driven,  mobile-first storytelling formats will come increasingly to the fore.

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Their bullishness for the stories format is shared by others, including Mark Zuckerberg.

“Stories are on track to overtake posts in feeds as the most common way that people share across all social apps,” he said in a quarterly earnings call in January. “That's because stories is a better format for sharing multiple quick video clips throughout your day. The growth of stories will have an impact on how we build products and think about our business.”

The rapid growth of stories — a social media trend being rapidly embraced by brands, news organizations and individuals — is just one example of how social networking continues to rapidly evolve.

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Keeping up with these developments is always a challenge, but one that opens new creative and editorial possibilities.

News organizations and journalists alike need to continue to keep abreast of consumer preferences and experiment with social media.

Guest Authored By Damian Radcliffe. Damian is the Carolyn S. Chambers Professor in Journalism at the University of Oregon, a Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and an Honorary Research Fellow at Cardiff University. Follow Damian on Twitter.

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"Like social networks in general..

These trends are just too big to ignore..Sad!" -DamianRadcliffe

• 

  Post Crafted By:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at GetMoreHere.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

YOUR 2018 Systematic Social Media Marketing?

Social media saw significant growth in 2017. Mobile social media usage grew 30% year over year, Instagram monthly active users grew to 700 million and Snapchat and Pinterest continued to see increased engagement metrics.

Brands of all sizes cranked up spending to ride the social media wave, with advertising spend on social media increasing by over 60% in 2017.

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While impressions on social media platforms didn’t increase by over 60%, the cost of advertising on social media has risen as a result.

Take Facebook, for example, which charges by CPM: Average CPM on Facebook increased by 171% year over year, while CTR has remained flat.

How should advertisers cope with rising costs on social media, which has become a necessary marketing channel? The solution lies in taking a systematic approach when implementing your creative, distribution and campaign management.

There are many out-of-the-box solutions that can help you successfully implement a robust system for media buying on social platforms. They usually exist in two camps. The first camp starts with scrum management tools. Several software options exist today that assist project planning and management between creative and marketing teams, specifically for social media needs, such as Sprinklr and Falcon. Tools in this camp facilitate the best-case scenario among cross-functional teams. They automate project management tasks, facilitate discussions among teams and enable file and data sharing in one place for each project. These benefits are critical elements to deliver on-brand creative assets in a timely and smooth manner.

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The second camp of tools tackles campaign management.

They aim at a perfect system that manages your media buying based on your specific needs and goals. Reality is less than perfection, but it is one giant step closer to successfully automating media buying. Kenshoo and Nanigans are examples of tools that belong in this camp. Their major value-add is that they cut out inefficient spend.

The software bids on your target audience and frequently checks in on campaign performance -- much more frequently and accurately than a human could. Imagine you have set up over 50 campaigns running across all social media platforms and each campaign targets 10 audiences -- that is 500 ad sets to monitor at once. The automatic system leverages software capability to monitor all assets at 30-minute intervals or less. This allows your campaigns to run more efficiently because you are eliminating inefficient spend at least twice an hour across all of your assets.

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Now that we understand the importance of systemizing social media efforts, you might assume that that's it.

On the contrary, the more impactful benefit of system implementation is that it builds a culture that is poised to scale. There are inevitably social media platforms that software solutions haven’t reached.

The average internet user today has seven social accounts. To reach them everywhere, you need to implement systems on as many platforms as possible. To contend with platforms that software does not cover, you must create a culture that celebrates efficiency and automation in order to build a custom solution.

In addition, there will be newer platforms that reach various audiences where existing software solutions have not yet caught up. Figuring out how to succeed on newly established platforms requires efficient systems and a culture that supports them.

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With culture in mind, you will soon discover that each social media platform has its own context. Audiences, interactions and content are unique to each platform.

As a result, your systems for project management and media buying will and should differ from one platform to the next. Take Facebook and Instagram, for example.

Your Facebook audience demonstrates different behaviors than your audience on Instagram. As a result, the solution that you build to generate target audiences should be different between Facebook and Instagram. The signals that flag engaged audiences should be different between these two platforms. Reaction numbers may be a signal that you use to measure Facebook engagement, while video watch rate may be a more appropriate signal to measure Instagram engagement.

Guest Authored By Lu Chen. Lu is Senior Director of Marketing at THINX, Digital Scientist, Digital Marketer and Public Speaker. She also writes Sci-Fi. Follow Lu on Twitter.

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"Build systems and build a culture that is system-friendly to optimize social media spend in the future.

As social media advertising costs continue to rise and new platforms pop up, taking a systematic approach ensures efficiency over time.." -LuChen

• 

  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBr@nd.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, CO  where I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)