Research from Comscore last month revealed that 89.6% of Australia’s web population used a social networking website in February 2010. On average each user spent over 3.5 hours during these visits and 69.4% of these users were visiting Facebook.
The only country that had high results in the Asia Pacific Region was the Philippines.
These kind of statistics strongly suggest that those businesses investing time and money into social media such as Facebook and Twitter should be reaping the rewards of doing so.
However many businesses dive into Facebook and Twitter, without a real understanding of social media, and how to best utilise it.
The most common mistake is that a business or brand creates a Facebook or Twitter account page, and then bombards this account with “selling messages” for a few weeks, e.g. 20% off this month, 30% off this week, buy one get one free. The business or brand then finds their target audience has switched off, and abandons their page or account.
Users have become fans of your businesses’ Facebook page, or are following you on Twitter because they are generally interested in what your businesses does, wants to interact with your business online via this medium, and does not want to be “sold to” 24/7.
So keep your status updates, postings and tweets interesting. You want people to read them, follow links, or perhaps reply back (hence building a community).
So here are some guidelines:
- Create links to your Facebook Page, or Twitter account on your website, consider including these in your email campaigns, day to day emails, or even in your offline media (print and broadcast).
- Post interesting topics. Encourage discussion. Funny posts (that are a bit from left field) can position your business or brand in a different light.
- Try to post regularly (at least twice a week).
- Don’t post the same thing twice.
- Create a resource. Post links, videos and status updates to things your customers might be interested in, or need to learn about.
- Create competitions that engage your users, e.g. join our Facebook page and every month we will post a promotion code that will give you $10 off in our store.
- Know your target audience. Speak their language; consider running ads on Facebook that specifically target this audience.
