by Adam Gray | @AGSocialMedia | LinkedIn
Do you remember before the internet existed? Do you remember how the telephone and the pub and bumping in to people in the street was how you learned about things and found opportunities with you life…parties…jobs…exciting new inventions and discoveries?
So do I, but time change, things move on.
The internet has fundamentally re-plumbed how people communicate. Now we have so many sources of information and opinion and this has changed so many things. In the business world nowhere is this more apparent than in the dynamic between the buyer and a company’s sales teams or marketing department.
Before the days of the internet sales was (relatively) easy. You would reach out to someone – introduction, telephone, letter even door knocking and you would tell them about your product and if they liked you or it they very well might buy. This was because it was extremely hard for them to understand what the marketplace looked like. They couldn’t easily identify your competitors. They couldn’t know whet er your product lived up to the hype? The couldn’t see what your customers said about the product. So really they had to make their decision based on what you told them.
Now though, none of those things are true.
If you turn up on my doorstep and try to sell me something I can in a mater of seconds identify who else is in that space, whether your product is reliable and good and whether r your customers feel that have made the right decision.
The important thing to remember here is that I don’t need to consume ANY of your corporate material to do this, and as we know, all corporate material says basically the same thing – buy me because I’m best.
So, if I don’t consume your corporate material…what do I consume?
The answer is third-party content. Content that you, the corporate, cannot control. This might be content from expert analysers such as Forrester or Gartner, it might be from “impartial” third party experts and influencers or it might be from “real” people who have had experience of the product or service. This, is social media.
Wikipedia defines social media as “interactive computer-mediated technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, career interests and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks.”
So given that social media is a corporation’s worst nightmare (but arguably the buyer’s best friend) that sounds like it’s a great place to do research about purchases, and to forge relationships.
“Buy my buyers aren’t on social media” I hear you say!
Ermm…yes they are, and here’s why.
The most recent research from Gartner says that there are an average of 8+ people in the modern buying team. This means that your “buyer” is now NOT an individual, but a group of people who need to achieve a consensus to move forward. Each of these people will have their own ideas about who looks like the right decision and will most likely share them with the rest of the team. The chances are they will gain this information partly (or perhaps largely) from the social media world as that is the home of impartial opinion.
The number of people on social media is perhaps best described this way – 57% of the world’s population are internet users (so that’s basically everyone in the developed world) and of those 79.5% are “active” social media users. So by the time you discount the very young and the very old…that’s pretty much everyone. (those figures come from the quarterly digital report compiled by Simon Kemp for Hootsuite & We are Social).
If you would rather think of it another way, consider this…
If you add together the number of monthly average users on the top 10 social networks (Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Messenger, WeChat, Instagram, QQ, Tumblr, QZone, Tik Tok) that number is 4 billion people MORE than the entire global population…and that doesn’t include Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn, or any of the other networks.
In 2019, the reality is that marketing, sales, communications, reputation are ALL residing within social so you would be well advised to have a strategy which recognises this!
People who read this article also read these:
https://www.social-experts.net/side-by-side-social-vs-spam/
https://www.social-experts.net/cold-calling-lies-and-the-lying-liars-who-tell-them/
https://www.social-experts.net/what-can-the-baseball-world-series-teach-is-about-social-selling/
