Social Media is hot right now and rightly so. It offers enormous potential for brands and organizations. In essence it’s a new way of reaching and communicating with your (potential) consumers.
1. You can communicate every day
Through Social Media brands and organizations have the opportunity to communicate on a daily basis with their (potential) fans. This is a huge benefit over the other media, as print advertising, a magazine, newsletter, emails, etc can be sent at intervals of 4 weeks or more. This makes it difficult to get your message across at the right time.
By using Social Media a brand or organization can communicate every day making the messages more relevant for it’s followers or fans. It can differentiate its messages based upon the different days. Messages can also be timed to be delivered at a specific time of the day, thus delivering a message that is relevant for the start of the day.
For example: A message targeting Golf in the weekend can be posted on Thursday as a soft nudge or reminder and a message about an evening event can be posted in the late afternoon.
Communicating every day increases the number of messages and relevance over the traditional media. Yet communicating everyday on Social Media requires short lightweight messages. These daily lightweight messages add up to form a more intense and loyal relationship.
2. People who react extend the reach of your message to their friends.
The added benefit is that the people who react to your messages share this with their friends and in essence start communicating and advertising for you. This can be powerful because it increases the reach of your message, and your fans become advocates of your message. Added to that their friends may start reacting and thus increasing the power of your message exponentially.
For example; A message from a golf course about how inviting the course looks today may be liked by one of the golf course fans. By liking this message it is passed on to the friends of the fan who liked the message. One of the friends might react with a message asking his friends to play a round of golf. This in turn might invite others to react and join the round of golf.
3. Targeting specific groups
By using Facebook, Brands and organizations can target specific groups with their messages, but can also use advertising to reach specific groups of (potential) customers. A message can be targeted based on Age, Location, Family make up, Education, Relationship status, Interests and brands they like, etc. This offers a huge potential to effectively reach (potential) consumers with your message eliminating waste. On other Social Media such as Twitter it is harder to target beyond keywords.
For Example: A Golf Course could target all men on Facebook between the age of 24 and 55 who live close to the Golf Course and have Golf as an interest.
Social Media offers huge potential to get your message across in an effective way and brands and organization need to start using this new communication tool. With is they can communicate daily, extend the reach of their message through the people who interact with the message and target specific groups.
