Social media channels- there's more to life than Twitter ? CIMCIG ...

Nick Pauley- MD of Pauley Creative

According to Wikipedia?s non-exhaustive ?List of Social Networking Websites? page there are, at the time of writing, more than two hundred social networking websites in various states of growth and decline.

Now consider this, that?s two hundred social websites with a collective registered community of around five billion registered users. The vast majority of those gazillions will not matter a bit to you or to your business. It?s the rapid growth or user adoption and the subsequent ?potential? reach that can?t be ignored.

?there?s more to life than Twitter

Twitter has reported half a billion users worldwide. Facebook has reached a billion users but according to Forbes their adoption rate is in decline by 1.1% in the US.

Linkedin, a stalwart of B2B social media, has 161 million users and continues growing. Pinterest has 11 million pinners and counting (mostly wives, architects and interior designers) and Instagram has attracted 80 million users. Foursqaure has 20 million users and 60% of them are male. Tumblr- the blogging platform has 12.5 million users generating over half a billion page views per month.

There is even a gaggle of ginormous international social sites that you may not have heard of: Qzone (in China) has around 500 million users.

Badoo and Orkut are popular (collectively reaching over 300 million users) in Europe, India and Latin America. But who cares right? No customers there.

So there IS more to life than Twitter then?

Well, if you roughly add up the numbers on the Wikipedia list, there are 4.5 billion users currently engaged in social networks other than Twitter. Is it fair to say then, that at some point, a small minority of these humans will come into contact with your business, either directly or indirectly from social networking sites other than Twitter? I think it is.

So perhaps the question is ?Which complementary social platforms should I be considering??

Moving forward with growing social adoption

With 86% of companies (Econsultancy report) now employing the services of both Twitter and Facebook, my next question and probably yours too, would be how many of those businesses questioned were indeed from the Construction industry? I suspect not many.

The CMI 2012 survey suggests that the barriers are coming down, especially from the professional service industries within the construction sector. The proportion of companies with a written policy now allowing the use of Twitter amongst Quantity Surveyors, Building Service Engineers and Architects has risen dramatically in the space of year and this trend is matching the phenomenal speed of adoption of social media platforms as marketing tools by mainstream marketers.

How you will get the most out of social platforms

The success lies in research work carried out prior to the media being selected in the first place. For building product manufacturers, which make up the majority of our own clients, Twitter is most often prescribed as an integrated marketing tactic primarily to direct visitors to content and as a customer ?help? tool. It is employed to drive traffic to blogs and resource centres and for picking up opportunities through listening for particular search queries and questions. It?s great for networking and referring contacts and it can be a really effective customer service channel, for being generally helpful.

As with all marketing channels Twitter is measured and reviewed. Its use is tested and refined.

Measure what matters

Using something as cheap and cheerful as Google analytics you can analyse what?s been useful and what?s been not so. The results will more often than not help you decide which platforms to focus on in the future.

The mainstream social platforms are hard to ignore due to their volume of users but don?t overlook the niche platforms, forums and blogging sites before you?ve done your homework. You should have a look at what people are saying about you, you products or your business.

But the ultimate answer is unique to your own business, its goals and target market and as a suggestion you could start by asking yourself three or four good questions.

1. Why do I want to use Social Media?

2. Who am I looking to engage with?

3. What information is going to be relevant?

4. What and how will I measure success?

Source: http://www.cimcig-blog.org/2013/01/social-media-channels-theres-more-to-life-than-twitter/

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