Understanding the Benefits of Social Media

Social media marketing carries many benefits. One of the most of important
is that you don’t have to front any cash for most services. Of course, there’s
a downside: Most services require a significant investment of time to initiate
and maintain a social media marketing campaign.

As you read the list of benefits, think about whether the benefit is one that
applies to your needs. How important is it to your business? How much time
are you willing to allocate to it? What kind of a payoff would you expect?

Casting a wide net to catch your target market
The audience for social media is huge. In mid-2010, Facebook claimed almost
500 million users, many of whom use the service multiple times per week
(and others who never use it after the first time). By mid-March 2010, weekly
traffic on Facebook had exceeded weekly traffic on Google, which had worn
the traffic crown for years. Twitter claims more than 100 million users and
insists that millions of tweets (short messages) are posted daily. Even narrowly
focused networking sites claim hundreds of thousands of visitors.

A relatively small number of power users — those who post ten or more
times per day — drive a huge number of tweets. The vast majority of users
either read messages only, without posting, or post only one or two messages
per week. It’s probably the old 80/20 rule at play: 80 percent of the
users produce 20 percent of the tweets, and 20 percent of the users produce
80 percent of the tweets!

Surely, some of the people using these sites must be your customers or
prospects. In fact, one popular use of social media is to cast a wide net to
capture more potential visitors to your Web site. The classic conversion
funnel shown in Figure 1-7 shows the value of bringing new traffic to the top
of the funnel.

If more people arrive at the top of the funnel, theoretically more will progress
through the steps of prospect and qualified lead to become a customer.
Only 2 to 4 percent, on average, make it through a funnel regardless of what
the funnel decision is.