For many, the arrival of social media heralded a new dawn for brands and marketers, but in 2013 a fair bit of cynicism has begun to creep in. Whether you spent thousands of pounds creating a campaign on Facebook and all you got were a few ‘likes’ (many of which turned out to be fake) or you employed a team of fresh faced social media managers but can’t work out whether you got any ROI, quite a lot of fingers have been burnt in the social media fire.
The problem is though that the die has been cast. Whatever you think about social media, it’s here to stay and consumer expectations have changed forever. They expect your brand to be social across the entire business from how you promote your latest offers to how you respond to customer service queries and if you aren’t social they are going to go elsewhere.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. In fact it’s quite the opposite. There are over 1 billion people with Facebook accounts and over 500m tweets each day globally and just by the sheer force of numbers it’s irrefutable that your current and future customers are using social media every day. So rather than look at social as something you have to do reluctantly, all brands have a huge opportunity to turn social into cold hard cash.
Up until now, the difference between success and failure has got nothing to do with social media as a channel but has more to do with expectations of what it can deliver and most importantly, the tools used to harness all those conversations, updates and images.
Just focusing on finding new prospects, social media can be a potential goldmine. Every day thousands of people in the UK turn to Twitter to express their needs and intentions about a whole range of things from complaining their boiler has broken to trying to find a good local gym. Many of these tweets are commercially addressable and this presents a huge opportunity for advertisers to engage with consumers and turn them into paying customers.
There are many reasons why many companies have been unsuccessful at this so far. Finding the right conversations in the first place can often be the biggest challenge, but at the same time the ability to interact with potential customers in the right way at the right time has also been a major barrier to success.
The adoption of new online marketing channels has historically been driven by the sophistication of tools available and social media is no different. As more tools come onto the market and can be integrated into existing technology and processes such as CRM systems and campaign management systems we are set to see a step change in how social media is used.
Justin Rees is co-founder of Leadfindr
How you can make social media pay http://t.co/T2OszB02gy
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