Love it hate it – you can’t escape social media; there’s nowhere to hide… it will find you!
Yes indeed there are many ways you can now be tracked down and targeted with information, bulletins or offers, but what effect does that have on your love (or hate) of this form of communication? Surely we should have a say in who gets in touch with us, and when. So has the world gone socially unstable? The latest buzz phrase speaks volumes… ‘word of mouth’ has gone ‘world of mouth’. With 200million + Facebook posts made every day, if Facebook was a country it would be larger than America. Striking facts, and there’s more: some British Universities are now not issuing students with an email account – but an i-pad instead! These are tomorrow’s businessmen and women – and they’re growing up with social media as THE channel for learning, sharing and ‘liking’ what they see online.
Are we therefore becoming a digital community? Let’s look at how social media is playing a part in business:
Facebook Re-marketing (sometimes called Auto Re-marketing)
This is where the pages you look at when casually browsing online ‘follow’ you around from site to site. It’s done by hooking a piece of tracking code to your device, which attaches the ‘paid-for advertising’ pages to your google searches.
So for instance if you look at a specific kettle on the Habitat site, and then you go to John Lewis, an advert for that kettle on Habitat will appear in the top, side or bottom of the John Lewis page. These adverts will then follow you from site to site in the hope that you see it often enough to go back to it. Or, you just get fed up and log off and have a glass of wine instead! Companies pay for this form of advertising, you can choose the size of banner ad you want and then submit a specific piece of code, which is then used to hook onto any visitors to your site and follow them wherever they go. The more you pay the more it will follow. Sounds good doesn’t it? Until you realise it can get extremely annoying as many ‘log off and have a glass of wine instead’. Hmmm! The verdict is out, however some companies do claim up to 40% increase in sales through this form of ‘track-selling’.
Beacons
These are small wireless devices used to broadcast a signal that can be picked up by any smartphone. Businesses use this to send you those annoying texts that you have no idea why you are getting! Using Bluetooth, they trigger an APP. that enables the company to send text alerts to offers – these are more widely acceptable, but nonetheless still annoying because you didn’t sign up to receive them. However survey results are good with over 70% shoppers buying from companies who sent them Beacon alerts.
Blogs are the new ‘news’
Everyone writes blogs now – it’s like an online diary for some, a rant for the ‘grumpy’, a journal of events for others and a way of subliminally cross-selling (getting other companies to sell what you do) for savvy business people. The number of students creating their own WordPress blog page is steadily increasing, they find it a way to share their study material, comment on topics and create a following through their thought leadership. However the golden rule of blogging is you can’t sell what you do, it has to be useful content only.
Video content is essential for all websites – so says Google
Google now rank websites on content, and recently upped the pressure by ranking all sites with video content (as long as it was relevant content) higher than those without. The good news is that it’s now easier for anyone to produce a video through online sites such as Vimeo and Animotto.
Facebook Groups
Companies and organisations have realised the potential threat that social media sites can cause to their business, and individual employees, so they now create Company Facebook Groups, which you can join by invitation only. The plus side to this is increased security, the downside is that any individual joining may have poor privacy rules on their private social pages which can be accessed via these groups. This is how so many people lose their jobs.
Periscope
Sounds like a spy apparatus – and to be honest it practically is! Periscope is one of the latest APPs that uses your smartphone to stream live footage taken by your phone’s camera – this could be anything from important events to random silly nonsense. It was sold to Twitter for $100m, and who knows whether it was worth it? Time will tell. With other instant uploading sites such as Pinterest and Instagram being the world’s favourite apps at the moment there’s strong competition, the only difference being that this is live video as opposed to pics. Videos stay live for 24 hours, so there’s plenty of time for a multitude of comments – good and bad!
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