Social Media Solutions From Purple Dog
Social Networks and Social Media are now the most popular form of communications, even more popular than email.
Consider the current stats for Facebook: according to its newsroom, there are 2.45 billion monthly active users as of the third quarter of 2019 and 1.49 billion daily active users, with 100 billion+ messages shared every day. An Active User is someone who has logged in to Facebook during the last 30 days.
It's difficult not to be a part of this global phenomenon, however, every business is different and while some businesses benefit well from certain social media platforms, others do not.
Which Social Network(s) Should I Engage With?
The answer is - it depends on a few different factors:
- What kind of business you run, what you sell and how you sell it;
- Who your typical customer is and how you wish to engage with them;
- Your appetite for Social Media.
If you sell online and your audience is global, then it would make perfect sense to use social media to help you gain traction and we would at least recommend a Facebook Business Page and perhaps a Twitter account.
The important thing is to understand the pros and cons of Social Networking:
Pros:
- Brand Awareness: Increased exposure to potentially very large audiences.
- PR & Marketing: Free platforms to publicise your recent successes, current sales and promotions, events and more!
- Customer Engagement: Garner trust and loyalty and gather feedback from your customers.
- Search Engines: social networking pages are indexed by search engines, meaning that this is another way to get listed in Search Engine Results Pages. Your profile information and links back to your website could increase your page ranking, and the traffic to your website.
- Name Protection: register your brand presence and help users to find you easily (especially if you have name competition);
- Competition: are your competitors using Social Networking to gain the edge?
- Fast: It's quick and easy to get a bite sized message out
Cons:
- Negative Reviews: The internet is notorious as being a place of anonymous users who hide behind private profiles and those who "troll" (seek to inflame and provoke reaction from) others for sport and sometimes, to intentionally cause harm. Then there are genuine customers who have had a bad experience, for whatever reason and who wish to complain or share their grievance in public. If not dealt with quickly and professionally, this can present problems for businesses, where the social media account can become a place of negativity, or where it has attracted slander / negative reviews or comments, particularly if something unpleasant has "goes viral" and attracted a lot of toxic attention. Obviously, such issues can significantly impact the business and can therefore become a "mine field" to navigate;
- Additional time needed: Social media can be quite time-consuming because you need to regularly update the information / posts with fresh content and this can distract you from your main business. Furthermore, if you have to engage with many people due to multiple comments, questions on posts etc, it could mean you'll need additional staff.
- Transparency: Other users can see how many "followers" you have, or how many people are reading / liking your posts. If you don't have very many followers, this can indicate to others your business size / how popular you are and therefore affect customer perception of your company.
- Risk of Over-Simplification: While it is tempting to always communicate with one or two "bite-sized sentences" via e.g. FB or Twitter post, it's much better to write regular news articles on your website - because these are especially good for your SEO and it will likely attract customers.
- No Control: There is a danger of Closure or change of Terms of Services because social media platforms quite often change their design, or modify they way things function and their TOS. The content you post on their site is quite literally, 'theirs to do with what they will'. If something changes and you lose that content, it could mean a lot of lost information / content or valuable connections. For this reason, we still recommend that your own website should be your primary tool of communications with your customers.
Why You Need Purple Dog
Social Networks, though powerful, can take up a lot time to manage. In fact, the more you engage with your audience, the more your audience will engage with you. Whilst this is fantastic for viral marketing and exposure, this typically means keeping pages updated, answering queries, responding to other people’s comments, prompts and so on.
We are experienced at integrating businesses into the social networking space. We provide guidance on which channel(s) and which approach is best for your business. And finally, we can assist you with running your profile site or ad campaigns to ensure consistent exposure and positive results.
Our Service:
- Account Set Up / Custom Designed Facebook Pages
We’ll help you get set up, if you are not already and create a custom Facebook Page for your business (landing page) that’s in-keeping with your company branding / products.
- Integrate with your website
One message can be displayed across many platforms. Don't spend time managing several apps - do it all from your website! Creating conversations directly between your website and your Facebook fans is easy. We'll show you how. - Promotions
Many of the social network channels offer paid promotional / advertising opportunities to help develop awareness of your pages / event / product or service. There are usually several methods to control expenditure, such as capped daily budgets. - On-going management
If you don’t have the time (or inclination) to manage the day to day tasks of keeping your profile up to date, we would be happy to do it on your behalf. - Guidance, advice, support and training
We can assist you to do your best, show you the ropes and provide advice and support for the tricky things!