Why Ignoring Social Media Is Bad For Your Business?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or in denial), you’ll know how important Social Media platforms are and how integral they have become in our lives.
Just to clear the air:
“Websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking are called Social media”
They have become the new normal in connecting, celebrating, teasing, experiencing, researching, etc etc etc. Obviously with such a huge audience (Estimated that 2.95 Billion – with a B – people were on social media by the end of 2019 alone. January 20 saw 49% of the ‘world’s population’ being introduced to social media), that was a huge bracket, we’ll shift to the next sentence now. So, such a huge audience attracts the obvious – brands, advertisers, influencers and the works.
The amount of social media advertising is so absurd that I cannot explain it any easier than saying that last year INR 80,82,64,00,50,000 was spent worldwide by companies. This is only set to rise by 6% year on year. That’s INR 4,84,95,84,03,000 a year of increase in ad spends on social media.
Now that I have your attention in all sincerity, let’s understand the relevance and reasons behind this rise of social media for business. Roughly 45% of the world’s population spend an average of 2 hours and 23 minutes per day on social media. This is predominantly consumed via smartphones. What this means is undivided and immersive attention of the user. This is exactly what attracts advertisers to social media.
You see, one can be watching television while reading a newspaper or cooking, or one can be hearing the radio while working or driving and vice versa. You don’t and can’t really expect undivided attention of the user on any other media. Social media on the other hand has so much research and money flowing into the design of its User Interface (UI) & User Experience (UX) that it is able to hold the attention of the user for a longer period of time. This is all possible because of customisation of content according to the likes and dislikes of the user.
This takes us to the next part, where the amount of time spent on these social media is actually coming from the want of gratification. This want for gratification makes most people come back again and again for more. This data from users on what they like, what they dislike, what catches their eye, which links they click, what pages they like, which groups they follow, which brands they admire, their political, religious, sexual, etc preferences and so much more.
Whoa right?! – that’s a lot of data which is being processed using modern day technology like artificial intelligence and machine learning to predict what one may like.
Apart from this your location, your age, languages you speak, devices you use, your marital status, your professional progress, etc is also taken a note of to be used by advertisers for targeting. Advertisers are indirectly getting access to all these learnings to target a specific group of people which is apt for their brand/service/product.
What this essentially means is that a posh bakery situated in Wanowrie in Pune is able to target people who love bakery products or food in general, reside in a 2 km vicinity and are using high end devices to entice them to visit or order from the store.
I think you’ve got the gist of it. Moreover, this specific targeting obviously gives tremendous exposure to the RIGHT audience which in conventional media would not have been possible. This also reduces the overall costs as you are eventually reaching a target audience and not a general audience. You are able to get more bang for your buck and conversion rates are higher than compared to any other media.
So what have we learnt from this?
Social Media Advertising for Businesses is:
– Beneficial for Brand Presence
– Most economical for advertising
– Most engaging form of advertising
– Useful to increase brand loyalty
– Something you cannot ignore
But there has to be something more right? Whether you say yes or no, there is social media that helps get more relevant people to your website increasing your website ranking. This is of course useful in search engine ranking. People sharing your posts and ads increases your social media engagement and loyalty, thus your brand is growing with every passing moment. The insights that you garner from your pages/profiles help you narrow down on the perfect audience in terms of location & age plus gives insights into which content works for you the most. You can make adjustments in your offerings as the feedback is almost instant. There is just so much to it!
If you just got convinced about social media for your business, then you’re already in an ocean of your competitors who have used social media to their advantage. But the good news is, we can learn from what they;ve already done and make sure we can do better than them. Now when we say ‘we’, we mean you and Mark & Make Media who over the years have used technology, analytics and design to optimize spends of our clients to give them the best ROI possible. This world of digital marketing is vast and can be overwhelming unless you have the right partners with you! – we can be that.
Hope this was useful, check out some of our other blogs!