For many business owners and career professionals, I know you’ve already begun integrating social media marketing into your mix. But for a LOT of others – there’s been a hold, or a tip-toe approach.
Currently, there are 581 Million customers using social media – a number that’s growing every day. How will your business reach them before your competitors do? Are you starting to invest in a social media marketing campaign? Or you are still feel panic and frustrate to get into that.
Recently Inside Facebook reported that the US gain of more than 4.5 million monthly active Facebook users, it was the highest number of any country. Because of the large installed base of US Facebook users, it represented a 5% gain, compared with 10% growth in countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia.
The emarketer has also conducted a study that toward to the top 10 countries, which ranked by gain facebook users from Dec 2009 to Jan 2010, and Facebook audience growth in the past 30 days.
From above figure you can see, for its size, India added relatively few new users in December 2009. Its high 9% growth rate was from a very small base, and Facebook still reaches only 0.5% of the population of the country (Unfortunately, Thailand is not in the list). In regarding to the user’s rate of growth, the largest gain came from males ages 18 to 25, followed by women 26 to 34. Despite the already-large base of users under 35, those groups also posted the highest rates of growth.
On the other hand, for the government organization, Human Capital Institute and Saba recently did a study toward looked at the effectiveness of social networking in conducting government work, how agency type affects the use, the perception of social networking, and the future expectations and barriers for its use.
According to the study, Human Capital Institute find that 66% of all government agencies currently use some form of social networking – from blogs and wikis to instant messaging and discussion boards. 31% of those surveyed have embraced social media as a means of providing a more efficient customer feedback channel.
“Real-time collaboration and social networking technologies are rapidly migrating from consumers to both enterprises and government agencies,” said Saba Chairman and CEO Bobby Yazdani.
Come back to your organization social media marketing campaign, before you implement or investing in any type of online marketing or social networking solution, my advice for you in 2010 would be that – take the time to fully understand your targeted audience first. Try to determine what your online goals and objectives are, and make sure that your solution includes the most effective communication option(s) for your target market.
Most importantly, do not spend valuable time implementing an online campaign just because everyone else is talking about it. Once you’ve determined what your audience is interested in, take time to research the most appropriate strategy or network that suit your business needs. It will save you much time and money over the long run.
Social media marketing is a new efficient way that will help you drive traffic, generate the leads & sales, which you hadn’t thought of before. If you do in-house, try to use experiment with a hypothesis and measure the results method. You’ll see those little bets can go a long way to refine your marketing efforts – testing them and sharing the results will get your management’s attention and willingness to experiment more and try bigger efforts.
Good luck and have a fab 2010!
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