By the end of 2016 Facebook reported that it had over 1.8 billion users worldwide, a huge audience and a potential goldmine for your business. Whatever industry you are in, social media has changed the way you need to market your products and services.

The number of people who engage with an online community of some sort, either through blogs and forums or large social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn is growing everyday. It is now more common than not for a consumer to be a member of some form of online community. Add to this the hundreds of millions of people who communicate via Twitter and those that share links via Pinterest, share photos on Instagram or share content via bookmarking sites and you see how integral social media is to everyday life. It is this fact that describes just how important social media should be to your business.

Our individual reasons for using social networks and social sharing sites vary, however, what is present across all activities is the sharing of information in some form. We post status updates about what we are buying, we check-in to shops and pubs, we post photos of our meals. As savvy online consumers we also now look to our peers to find out about products, services and companies that they use and like. We also share stories of times a product or brand has failed us and our friends share in our experience and avoid making the same mistake by avoiding the same brands. We listen to people’s views about products and we actively seek information from other consumers on blogs and forums before we buy things. It is social media that allows us to do this because social media has created a platform from which we can all share our thoughts, feelings and recommendations. It is precisely because social media has put consumers in control of content that social media becomes an important consideration for companies that wish to manage their reputations and encourage interaction from consumers.

We can support you in the setup and management of your social media profiles across the main social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube etc.

Imagine you make cakes for a living. Your baking is the best, chocolate muffins with oozing centres, crisp buttery pastries filled with cream, chewy cookies the size of dinner plates, you get the idea. Now imagine a room full of one thousand hungry people all talking to each other about how hungry they are and how they can’t wait for lunch. If you send someone out into that room and hand out five cakes to five random people with a message that more cakes are available outside, what will happen? Those five people will devour their cake, the ten people stood around each of the lucky recipients will see what’s happening and want one of their own. Those fifty onlookers will start prancing around on tiptoes looking for the exit and asking other people around them whether they know where the cake shop is. Suddenly, in vast waves, people are swept up in the buzz and before you know it everyone in the room is jostling for the exit to go and buy a cake from you.

That imagined room full of cakes is in reality a Facebook page or Twitter profile. When one of your customers posts a picture of your cake and says how delicious it is there are likely to be ore than 100 people who see that post and act on it in some way. This is the power of social media marketing.

In contrast, imagine you have lots of happy customers but you have also had a few complaints over the years. Imagine you repeated the process above with your pastries and whilst four people enjoy their cake, one of the recipients did not like it at all. You would still create a furore, however, rather than a 1,000 hungry people looking for more cakes you would have just 400 interested people because 200 people in the room have heard rumours that your cakes are terrible. Perhaps those 200 people tell a couple more people each and all of a sudden you have a reputation issue.

People now naturally congregate in virtual locations, talking to each other online, sharing photos, stories and experiences. Most of your customers, both existing and future ones, are on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and blogs or forums talking about the products and services they buy. Are they talking about you? What are they saying? Your business needs to engage with people when they are talking about you, you need to listen to what they are saying, you need to make allies of them, you need to encourage them to talk positively about your offering. You need to control the conversation.

We can assist you in numerous ways from setting up a fully branded WordPress blog, creating a Facebook page for your brand and running competitions, setting up a Twitter profile and getting you followers, posting to Instagram, running discussions on LinkedIn and much more.

We can handle everything for you from the setup of accounts and profiles if you don’t already have them to the copywriting, image editing and management of the channels each month.

We can support you in the entire social media profile setup and management or we can step-in to take the strain of maintaining the profiles.

Our job is to ensure that the way you market yourself via social media receives maximum exposure at the lowest cost and with the best possible outcome for your brand.