Social Media a Good Bet for Your Brand

Recently I gave a social media presentation at a conference in New Orleans for one of our clients’ sales and development partners. The subject: how small to medium enterprises could integrate social media into their communications. As I was researching the presentation, I came across a couple of stunning infographics that summed up some recent demographic research about Facebook and Twitter. A couple of numbers really jumped out at me. On Facebook: 41% of users follow a brand and of those people, 51%
will purchase that brand. On Twitter, the numbers are even higher: of those users (25%) who follow a brand, 67% will purchase that brand.

Imagine for a second we were talking about odds on a horse at a race. Your odds of the Facebook horse winning are one in two. The Twitter horse, two in three. Pretty good odds, I would say.

Put another way, if you attract 5000 people to your Facebook fan page, you may very well sell over 2500 widgets.

The implications for the people at the conference were far reaching and inspiring. First of all, the question for many people became how, not if, they should be active on social media. Fewer than half of all users follow brands on Twitter and Facebook. How do you boost that number? How, and what would they do to attract the right kind of fans or followers, and how do you provide them with valuable information to engage in meaningful dialogue with them?

We discussed all kinds of options – Twitter is great for customer support; Facebook provides a terrific platform for discussion to engage with and learn from your followers, both Twitter (using services like Twitpix) and Facebook provide easy tools for photo sharing, which can be at the heart of great photo contests around the usage of your products.

How would you get people to follow your brand? How would you keep engaging with them?