Social Media Marketing

Social media has been called the biggest shift since the industrial revolution. In the past several years alone it has risen to become the most popular activity on the Internet, and over 96% of people under 30 belong to a social network of some kind.

It is said that if Facebook were its own country, it would be the world’s 3rd largest, eclipsing the United states in population. It isn’t only for the young, either. Facebook’s fastest growing audience is 55-65 year old females.

Oh, and by the time you’re done reading this article, roughly 120 hours of video will have been uploaded to YouTube.

The bottom line is that if your company isn’t on board and competing well, your being left in the dust of your industry, complaining with the other non-adopters who swear this whole “social media thing” is just a passing fad. Those companies would do well to remember that the same thing was once said about the telephone, the internal combustion engine, the Internet, and every other significant business trend to come along in the past century. Put another way:

“We don’t have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how well we do it.” – Erik Qualeman, Author of Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business

It’s undeniable – the social web has changed the way businesses must behave in order to gain new customers and keep existing ones satisfied. Think about it – 10 years ago, if a company did something that made a customer angry, he or she had very few options outside of calling the customer service line to complain.

Today, that same customer might have a blog with hundreds of thousands of readers, or a Facebook page with an army of friends and family members. All it takes is one angry post about their experience and suddenly the brand’s reputation is ruined for that entire network of people.

This realization has forced companies to move away from pre-sales hype and focus on a quality post-sales experience. From membership communities to instant customer service, if you want to be relevant in today’s world, there can be no ignoring social media.
Hearing all of this, it’s only natural to wonder how, exactly, social media can be used to grow your business. Though this is certainly not an exhaustive list,

Excedra specialized in using competitive social media tactics to:

• Increase your brand awareness.

• Generate hype for product launches.

• Improve your customer service.

• Monitor the social web for trends in opinion regarding your brand and those of your competitors.

• Increase traffic to your website through content marketing.

• Employee recruitment.

Sure, you could, in theory, buy a small library of books, study the latest and greatest “social media guru” lessons, attend conferences, sign up for every social account you can find, and stumble through getting some traction on the networks in a few months, but there is a very good reason why this is the wrong strategy for most businesses to take:

Social media has a long-term return on investment that takes time to become evident. It is by no means a “set it and forget it” solution.

Social media is a game of accretion, that is – your influence grows through the small, deliberate steps. The moves you make in the beginning can have a great impact on your success in the future. This is why it is so important to make sure your campaigns are set up the right way the first time around. Excedra possesses the knowledge to assess the needs of your business, and the connections, training, and proven experience to achieve the success you require. Excedra can help you dominate social networks via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.