Do I really need social networking?

I think this is a widespread dilemma for marketers, advertisers & webmasters. Whenever I suggest Social Media Networking/ Marketing to my clients I have been shot with one common question i.e.

“Why Social Networking? This is just waste of time & money.”

Do you really feel so?- I mean in this digital environment where we just can’t survive with traditional marketing approach where we have to shout to sell our products or services.

Well, social media is not just about advertisement and marketing, it’s simply more than that. It’s about people, interaction, humanization of brands, behavioral understanding, user engagement, customer relationship management, loyalty and much more.

We can call it Participatory Marketing where you are not the only person who is talking about your product, brand or services but audiences are actively participating and talking to each other about you. Once you do good work, you have the consumer acting as the evangelist.

Here I am consolidating some stats to tell you why social networking is important?

• almost 40% of adult internet users and 70% of teens use social networking sites monthly
• Online social network users were 3 times more likely to trust their peers’ opinions over advertising when making purchase decisions
• 84% says that they would trust users reviews over a critic
• Consumers wanted to see users reviews and ratings
• 75% of online shoppers read reviews
• 78% of consumers trust the advice of other consumers
• 85% of marketers agree that building customer trust will become marketing’s primary objective
• Social networks are the most popular sites for the coveted 18-24 years old age group, That’s right, social networks beat SE’s, web based email.
• Brands now have cost effective access to more than 500MM engaged users. 250 millions of them are on Facebook
• Youtube is getting almost 11% of all internet traffic
• As per alexa, Five of the top 10 websites are social (Youtube, Facebook, Myspace, Wikipedia and Blogger)

Social networking has become the life blood of businesses. It really helps to show presence everywhere (in web 2.0 world) beyond your own domain & area.

It’s really very helpful in knowing your audiences, their needs & feedback.

According to consumer research, consumers are spending 25-30% of their time online, so ad spend should follow that and stabilize around that level.

Advertising on blogging and social networking sites offers an opportunity to match unique keywords for each ad unit and narrow the targeting directly to the theme you want. Better targeting offers higher response to your ads.

Similarly, mobile marketing has set a new trend in online marketing industry. Now social networking is just a mobile beep away with a social networking platform, now available on GPRS handsets thanks to mobile networking. The service can be accessed through WAP and SMS also. For countries, where mobile penetration is higher than Internet penetration (like India), social networking through mobile will be one handy and cool way to stay connected with the network.

Mobiles; enables users to call or interact directly with a business, provides another avenue for driving revenue. Mobile phones offer more powerful targeting, interactivity and personalization capabilities than the Internet. Merchants can push coupons, store locations, and promotions to mobile users while they are out and about—so the users can put such information to immediate use. This is really very helpful in Local Business Marketing. Mobile phones are also ideal viral marketing tools: because users take their mobile phones everywhere, they can share content with people nearby and forward content to friends and family elsewhere.

I think you should also try to make your business a part of people’s daily conversation.

Tags: blogging, online marketing, SMO, social marketing, Social Media, social media optimization, Social Networking