Social Media Management

Social media is everything when it comes to effectively promoting one’s products or services. Since the turn of the century, it has become this nation’s most powerful promotion options and marketing tools. This alone is the lifeblood for many when it comes to promotion and marketing. Social media management for a business is key to success in the world today.

How Has Social Media Changed Marketing?

Social media pertains to any form of Internet app or website that acts as a content hosting entity. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Youtube, and Instagram are the main ones. Today, there are dozens of other ones. To be successful with a business, one must become quite skilled in social media management. Social media management is defined simply as putting together an image for your business, publishing that image on every social media outlet possible. And, then maintaining that social media presence, adding to it, subtracting from it, and generally improving it as the years go by and as times change.

Increasing Business through Social Media Management

Social media is a great way to make your business seen without instantly trying to sell somebody something. Rather, social media is utilized to get your business some instant recognition. You want to create a great image of your business and what you sell through social media, so that when a potential customer thinks of product X they think of you and they say, “Oh yeah, didn’t that company I saw on Facebook sell that thing?” Social media is all about brand recognition, making yourself look unique and interesting and a cut above the competition. Social media management, when done effectively, will actually pull in more customers regardless of what the product is.

With social media management, you are selling the idea of your company, to people, not so much the product itself. This is truly phenomenal and when it is done successful it is more valuable than any other form of marketing. The truth is, anyone can get excited about a product without even taking a glance at where it came from. If you can get people excited about the business that makes the product itself then you will develop lifetime customers who will buy everything they can from you.

Social Media Marketing & Statistics

Social media management has taken off like a rocket ship. For some statistics on it:

• 52% of online adults now use two or more social media sites.

• 70% of the U.S. population has at least one social networking profile.

• Of the 7.2 billion people on earth, 3 billion have Internet access; 2.1 billion are active on social media; and 1.7 billion use social networks from a mobile device.

• The number of worldwide social media users is expected to reach 2.5 billion by 2018.

• The average social media user maintains five accounts.

• Mothers with children under the age of five are the most active on social media.

• 90% of young adults (ages 18 to 29) use social media. 35% of those over age 65 do.

Let’s Examine Social Media Platforms

• Every minute, Reddit users cast more than 18,000 votes; Vine users play more than one million videos; and Snapchat users share nearly 285,000 snaps.

• The “most important” social networks to teens and young adults (aged 12-24) are now Instagram (32%), Twitter (24%), Facebook (14%), Snapchat (13%) and Tumblr (4%).

• Snapchat isn’t the best place for marketers (at least not yet). “Philosophically, it is important that Snapchat is a platform built for people and not for brands,” Snapchat’s CEO, Evan Spiegel, has stated.

• 90% of young adults—ages 18 to 29—use social media (compared to just 35% of those over age 65). Fully a third of millennials say social media is one of their preferred channels for communicating with businesses.

How Much of Marketing Comes Through Social Media Now?

• The share of marketing budgets spent on social media is expected to more than double over the next five years, from 11% today to 24% by 2020.

• Another survey predicted the share of overall digital marketing budgets devoted to social media marketing will increase from 9.9% today to 22.5% within five years.

• Social media advertising revenue will reach $9.8 billion in 2016.

• 22% of social media marketing activities are performed by outside agencies.

• Developing a social media strategy is a more common challenge among small businesses (55%) than enterprises (34%), while securing enough internal resources is a more common problem in larger companies (47%) than in SMBs (33%).

• 33% of millennials identify social media as one of their preferred channels for communicating with businesses. Less then 5% of those 55 and older agree.

• 74% of salespeople who beat their 2014 quota by 10% or more say they have an excellent understanding about the use of social media for prospecting, nurturing relationships and closing deals. They were over 6x as likely to exceed their quota than sales peers with rudimentary or no social media skills.