Social Media as a (Serious) Marketing Channel

Over the past five years social media has risen through the ranks from a relatively novel and light-hearted way to keep in touch with friends and family to a serious and highly regarded marketing strategy that can potentially catapult your brand, company, product or service to new heights. 

Although it’s still considered a relatively ‘newish’ concept, social media marketing in South Africa is a rapidly growing trend that simply can’t be ignored. Locally, the main platforms are Facebook, Twitter, MXit, YouTube, Linkedin, Blogger, Wordpress, Posterous and Tumblr. Of these, Facebook and Twitter are undoubtedly the biggest and best examples. Twitter has a strong B2B focus and acts as a medium for sharing information instantly and in real time, while Facebook is more ‘social’ and B2C focused, allowing people to ‘like’ and ‘share’ content they enjoy.

Most good online marketing strategies incorporate these two mediums because together they effectively:
• Target both B2B and B2C audiences
• Enhance a company’s online reputation and brand awareness
• Reach new target audiences who might not have known about a company before
• Allow companies to communicate more directly with their clients
• Keep track of what is being said about a company online and respond immediately
• Engage with customers on a more ‘human’, personal, dynamic and interactive level
• Develop an online identity for a company and its products or services
• Increase website traffic

Current stats speak for themselves and as of March this year over 3.8 million South Africans have a Facebook profile, that’s approximately 80% of internet users, each averaging 50 minutes a day on the site. One would have to be living under a rock not to see the marketing potential. As for Twitter, it has around 1 million local users (up from 90,000 in January 1010) and South African tweeps are tweeting approximately 1.5 million tweets per month. In fact, according to Sysomos, a Canadian research company, South Africa recently hit the 10th spot of the world’s top Twitter countries. And you thought social media marketing was lagging behind in our country?

The truth is though that many companies are hesitant to lay themselves out for fear of public criticism. Publicity, you see works both ways. It can either be hugely positive or hugely damaging and it’s the latter that requires careful cleaning up after. For this reason, if a company chooses to run a social media campaign it is vital that they have someone who can effectively and efficiently manage and monitor the sites and online reputation of that company.

As with most marketing strategies, you need to remember that each business or brand has different needs and targets, and what works for one might not necessarily work for the other. There are however a number of local companies that have successfully incorporated social media into their overall marketing strategy. These include Yuppiechef, GetSmarter and WebAfrica.These companies get top marks for (amongst other things):

• Generating a large and loyal following on their social network pages and successfully increasing their brand awareness
• Interacting with followers both en mass and individually
• Providing interesting and relevant content and information that their followers enjoy and want to share with others
• Responding quickly to customer queries and knowing how to handle both positive and negative comments and publicity

...It is however a long term, full time commitment and studies have shown that it can take 2-3 years to develop a full social media strategy. This is why it’s important that the company you hire to manage it has the relevant expertise and experience to help ensure you get the results you desire.

We’ve been running social media campaigns for our internal products for a few years now and have first-hand experience of how it works, how you can optimize it and what benefits it can bring to a company, which is why we’ve decided to take the next step and offer this service to our valued clients. So if you’re interested to see what social media marketing can do for your company, then give Lima Bean a call or find out more about it at http://www.limabean.co.za/e-marketing