Why Your Business Can’t Ignore Facebook and Twitter – SCARY Truth Revealed!

Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately, you would have heard of the meteoric rise to fame of new social media websites like Facebook and Twitter:

Here are 7 interesting stats:

1.  Facebook is growing at the rate of the size of a city per day!

2.  Twitter’s monthly growth rate (as a percentage) is nearly 4 times that of Facebook

3.  Twitter currently has about 14 million users, and it’s estimated to grow to 50 million by the end of this year!

4.  See the graph below from www.compete.com which show how Facebook and Twitter are growing much faster even than YouTube and how Facebook alone has rocketed past YouTube in terms of popularity!  Also see how Google is pretty much flat-lining!  Hmmm… interesting!

5.  Twitter is growing at over 1200% annually – 76% per month!  That’s insane!

6.  It took Google 10 years to get to 50 million users, Facebook did it in 24 months, what will Twitter do?!

7.  Microsoft has their own  "Twitter outreach team".  Other major companies (who are not selling IT or web products) are also using Twitter to reach and engage customers.  For instance Starbucks, Ford, Pepsi, Sprint, Rotary Clubs, Oracle, and Wedgewood.

So What – You Might Ask?

Here’s 5 Reasons Your Business Should Be On These Sites!

Reason #1: First of all, this IS the way of the future!  Several of these "Web 2.0 properties" put together already get MUCH MORE traffic than Google does! LOT’s of people now look to Web 2.0 sites as sources of trusted referrals to a wide range of products and services they may be looking to purchase.   But this stuff does take a little bit of "getting familiar with"! So every few months you wait, means you are giving opportunity to your competitors to get a head start on you, and this type of marketing is such that you have to build up a "presence" and a brand steadily over time.  Now is the time to start!

Reason #2: The ability to use Twitter particularly, to do market research, find out what people are saying in your industry (even about you and your company!) and build a list of targeted followers is nothing short of astounding – but most people (including me until only a little while ago!) have no clue about these features of Twitter!

Reason #3: You can use Twitter as an awesome  customer service tool – more below;

Reason #4: Unless YOU are  building and managing your brand reputation (and we ALL have a brand, my brand is "Peter Cutforth"!) someone else might be managing it for you… negatively! This is the SCARY truth I referred to in the Subject line.  Read on… don’t miss this!

We’re now living in the age of "UGC – User Generated Content".  eBay probably started this many years back, with their Feedback system, which if you’ve ever been an eBay seller, you know is incredibly effective at keeping you accountable to provide good service!  Now this is extending out into whole industries, and with the advent of Facebook and Twitter, into the commercial marketplace generally.

For instance have you been on an accommodation search website recently? Noticed how many places have feedback from people who have stayed there?  How much effect do you think that feedback has on their bookings?  Yep, a massive effect. I saw one place recently that had had an overwhelming number of "Thumbs downs" and vitriolic comments!  There’s NO WAY I’d stay there in a pink fit!

Now, with Twitter, this dynamic has broadened out to be pretty much universal.  In the Twitter community, if someone doesn’t like what your business has provided for them, there’s a good chance you’re going to get that fact broadcast out to thousands, tens, or even hundreds of thousands of faithful followers!  Think on that for a minute!

For instance, check out this 20-something year old blogger with over HALF A MILLION followers:  http://twitter.com/ijustine

Thankfully, it also works the other way as well – with recommendations:

Notice how in this post she recommends a cafe/restaurant she’s been to recently:

That post goes out the over half a million followers – OK not all are going to read it, but trust me, many thousands would have!

But It Gets Better – or Worse!

One of the "cool" things about twitter is that it’s one of THE most viral Web 2.0 beasts to hit the internet yet! All because of two little letters:  "RT".

What RT means is "ReTweet".  So what happens is when a Twitterer likes someones else’s Twitter post (Tweet), they simply copy it and put RT, plus the ID of the original Twitterer in front of it, and send it out to all their followers as well!   And on and on it can go!

Here’s an example from my own Twitter account:

A week or so ago I tweeted out this message:
"What would you say if you weren’t afraid?" Think on this 🙂

About a day later, one of the thought leaders in Social Media Marketing I admire the most, Shama Hyder (@shama), "Retweeted" my post:

Shama RT @petercutforth: "What would you say if you weren’t afraid?" Think on this 🙂

Now Shama has over 10,000 followers, so do you think this helped me get a bit of exposure?  Absolutely.

So this is all very cool, but what if it works the other way around? People Tweet and Retweet about some problem they had with you or your brand, and if you don’t even have your head around twitter, first you’re not even going to know about it, and second you have no presence there to counter-reference their post.

Here’s an example of a company who looks like they’re really managing their social media profile exceptionally well – they also have over 500,000 followers on Twitter.  Check ’em out:  http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/twitter/

Notice how they are using Twitter to receive and respond to customer service gripes and issues, all in the public domain!  You can only see their responses on their Twitter feed, but the fact that they are responding is probably building them HUGE kudos within the Twitter community, dirving even more users to their local stores, and building their brand as a company that cares:

Reason #5: There’s ways you can monitor Twitter for posts about you and your company, which really makes this whole "gig" something you literally can’t ignore.

If this report’s been useful for you, you’re going to love Part 2, which is coming soon.

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Cheers

Peter