I have recently given up my final vice of the dreaded cigarette, since the 13th March to be exact… Not that I'm counting. They have been with me longer than most things in my life to be fair....
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div>I have recently given up my final vice of the dreaded cigarette, since the 13th March to be exact… Not that I’m counting. They have been with me longer than most things in my life to be fair, so I was a little sad to retire them, a lot like having to retire my trusted three wood last year, which has graced my golf bag for the past 15 years.
Looking back on the last six months I have to say that the decision to become non-smoker has been a lot less painful than I thought it was going to be, yes I’ve had the odd moment of weakness but to date the rollercoaster has been more of a lazy river!
A couple of months ago we were at York Races with our brokers and I got asked: “Nick, now you don’t smoke, drink, gamble or take drugs, what the hell do you do?” I did think about this for a minute and realised that social media has suddenly taken over the gap left in my hand since the departure of the cigarettes!
With Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+, YouTube and Facebook all downloaded on my iPhone it opens up a new world of exploration without leaving the comfort of your own environment and I find myself constantly reviewing the most up to date news, information and conversations in both the business and personal world. These relatively new mediums are reworking the way business branding and more importantly advertising is happening around the globe.
Here are a few stats which have those brand builders and marketers drooling in anticipation of the rewards for success:
• With more than 140 million regular users from 500 million active accounts on Twitter;
• Facebook has more than one billion active users. If the company were a country, it would be the third largest in the world after China (population: 1.34 billion) and India (population: 1.17 billion);
• There are more searches on Twitter than Yahoo and Bing combined Twitter 24 billion Yahoo and Bing 13.5 billion;
• LinkedIn has 187,000,000 members in 200 territories – with two members signing up every second; and
• Last year Instagram a photo sharing social media company, which was less than 2-years-old sold for $1 billion, The New York Times Company a 161-year-old company at the time was valued at just $960 million.
With numbers like these it is no surprise that the marketing and branding opportunities are huge providing you are willing to take the plunge and commit to the challenge of keeping up an informative, educational and entertaining; page, account or channel!
2012 marked the start of just this very social media experiment with Blemain Group (LinkedIn) @blemaingroup (twitter) (needless plug!). We decided after several meetings around content, ownership and structure that we should enter the next generation of marketing.
We discussed around the pros and cons of social media such as quick targeted marketing to your followers for instant information, communication in bite size format for ease of understanding, SEO support generated for your own company websites and your understanding of your client continues to improve but always remember one of the first rules of business “the more time you engage with a customer the more likely they are to buy from you”.
We felt these positives far outweighed the potential negative aspect of social networking, which may be the rare negative response to a situation. This is inevitable and for every negative comes learning, so as long as the lesson learnt and is rectified every negative can be a positive.
I suppose the question is how you build your network is the £1 billion question? There are many techniques to grow your brand awareness in social networking like having a £30 million budget for new followers or a TV campaign to promote your new product but to be fair given that we’re not just out of the forest of recession I’ve listed a few areas in which any business can help build up this network:
• Always look for the opportunities to promote your page or account, email signatures, websites, business cards and advertising;
• Most people who you follow and like will reciprocate the action, more action = increased network;
• Content is the key, it is the metaphoric petrol to the social media vehicle. Spend the time to ensure the content is concise, pertinent, educational and where possible entertaining; not just retweeting every BBC business article on the website; and
• Engage your existing network to encourage further members, offering a small giveaway or incentive?
Just remember social media is not about the sheer number of likes, share, followers or tweets but the quality of the network and how often they engage with you. This is certainly going to take over my life more as I become engrossed in this new media output much to my family’s dismay. Good luck to those on this journey and I’ll look forward to catching up online… @NickJones007 (another shameless plug).
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