1. Social Media In Plain English:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpIOClX1jPE

2. Twitter in Plain English

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o

3. Blogs in Plain English

www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN2I1pWXjXI

4. Podcasting in Plain English

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMgemQahuFM

5. Web Searching in Plain English

www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8aYoVpdz8o

Ok now go and lie down and have a rest, while you let all that bed in.

We hope you enjoyed our post for more of the same visit our site here at Truly Marketing Manchester

Which is understandable as, on the face of it, social media channels such as Youtube, Facebook and Twitter seem to be a place where people hang out to chat about who’s the latest celebrity trying to hide his or her indiscretions or a place to watch videos of people blending various household objects for fun.
(Which might help a electronic’s repair shop if they did decide to advertise next to it?) So, we fully understand why some business owners are skeptical about investing any time or money promoting themselves on the social networks.

These example’s above are real, but they are not the only discussions happening on social networks. So in an attempt to demystify some myths and false truths, we’ve decided put together a clearer outline of the real power that lies within social networking for our local small business owners.
In doing so we’re going to try to align major business goals and metrics such as ROI, End-to-End Conversion and Outcome Profitability with the benefits of a well planned, strategic social media marketing campaign.

But before we kick things off we wanted to talk about the mindset you must adopt when thinking about social media for business.
Firstly it’s not a platform for you to shout about your business and push sales messages out on autopilot. (yes lots of people are doing this)
It’s actually a powerful direct line of communication, that allows you to engage with real people.

Your aim is to build relationships with those people and in return for them to understand what your about, like what you have to offer and trust you enough to not only buy from you but also to recommend you to their friends and family. As the saying goes:

“we buy from the people we know, trust and like”

So as long as you keep these three goals in the back of your mind whenever you think about social media marketing. As we go through each of the main social media channels, you’ll start to see how they give you the ability to hit these goals in ways that other forms of marketing simply can’t reach.

So let’s just imagine for one moment that you’ve just had a conversation with a customer, who tells you; either in person or over the phone, that they are absolutely ecstatic about your product and the after care and service you’ve provided them.

Your beaming from ear to ear and looking around for a witnesses! Erm did anybody hear that?
No and your smile wains a little, you say to yourself. “If only people could hear reaction’s like that, I’d have people queuing up outside the door.”
In fact the best you can do is to finish off the conversation, by politely asking them to tell their friends and family about your business.
And if the accepted word of mouth ratio, came off. The customer will head off and tell one of their friends.

Well this is our first argument for why you’d have added more to your bottom line, had that conversation taken place on a social network.

Because there really would have been people there to listen in to your new company advocate as they waxed lyrical about your super service and product.
Do you think if that would help your company to grow it’s likability and trust, and do you think it would spur the listeners into finding out more about you?
My guess is that just one interaction like this could generate a lot more than the one recommendation you’d have gained offline.

Here are some facts to give you an idea of the potential ROI in conversing and building relationships with your customers online:

• On average a satisfied custom tells 1 person face to face
• 20% of word of mouth that happens online triggers 80% of word of mouth offline
• The average number of friends a Facebook account holder has is 130

Now let’s compare that with a more short term marketing channel still being used by many companies today, outbound telesales.
So how does outbound telesales to unqualified leads, overcome these same obstacles of being known, liked and trusted?

The fact is they don’t, it’s a numbers game and works by being able to catch someone that happens to be in need of the product at this moment in time.
And at what cost? Well to all those who really don’t need what your selling at that specific moment, you may actually be tarnishing your relationship with them and in some cases, irreversibly so. (In particular I’m talking about those cold calls that always come through just as your sitting down to eat)

Social media is a long term marketing strategy, it takes many of these and other types of online interactions to be able to pull in a steady flow of sales and new leads. However if done right the eventual payoff in both, the cost of putting it into practice and it’s potential reach leaves almost all outbound direct sales marketing strategies looking decidedly inadequate in comparison.

Now lets be clear, we are NOT stating that outbound sales don’t work and that you should ditch it immediately. Rather that you should consider spending some of that budget in building real relationships with your customers online as you may well find that pretty soon you might not need to invest so much of your marketing budget, on expensive telesales teams.

Now this is only a fraction of what Social Media marketing can achieve, however this post is getting decidedly long so we’ll leave it here for now.

For more information on how we can get you started with your online marketing strategy gives us a call on Tel:0844 770 7816
Or Download our FREE social media starter kit by clicking here

We hope you enjoyed our post for more of the same visit our site here at Truly Marketing Manchester