There was a time when people were skeptical about using Social Media to promote or advertise about their brand or for that matter even makes their presence felt. However, over the years with proven results, that, usage of social media actually works in favor of most companies and advertising is much cheaper with a better reach; there has been a boom in the picture of social media usage by companies and businesses.
Fun Facts:
1. Total number of Facebook users in the world as of 2015 is over 1.4 billion. (Source: Facebook)
2. Twitter disclosed its number of active monthly users as 232 million. (Source: Twitter)
3. Over 76% of Facebook users check their profiles at least once a day. (Source: IACP Centre For Social Media)
4. An average Facebook user has over 190 friends and has connections with over 80 community pages, groups, and events. (Source: IACP Centre For Social Media)
5. The average number of Facebook profiles created in a second (5) is greater than the number of people born (4.5)! (Source: IACP Centre For Social Media)
6. Over 300,000 users view Facebook in its translated version using the translation application. (Source: IACP Centre For Social Media)
The number of people on social media is increasing by the day and shareable content is the hottest thing on internet. Here’s why banks need to get to this field too:
1. Increase Visibility:
Source: tcfex.com
People come to social media for networking, to find entertainment and to spend leisure time. However, they also come to social media platforms for information on specific topics. Today, everything is going social, every brand, every personality and every business wants to be famous on social media.
This requires posting valuable content which is not just informative but also sharable. In many cases, the content might also need to attract the audience and trigger conversations. This is important because, the more valuable your content is, the better visibility you receive. People are hungry for information which can benefit them and if a bank is able to provide their audience with information that is high on value, it might even lead to increasing sales!
2. Information dissemination:
Source: nrccps.org
For banks, disseminating information is quite a tricky process. It is mostly an offline process or a well structured online one. However, how many people actually go to a banks website to read the latest developments unless they need it? Hence not many people stay aware about your company’s endeavors. Maybe, you released an amazing scheme but your lack of connect with the audience has led to people staying unaware about the deals.
Social Media works like an aggregator site and bring your most sorted after audience to you. Therefore promoting your schemes on social media is actually a great benefit for banks. More often then you know you might actually end up turning higher number of prospects into actual customers by using social platforms.
3. Know your customers:
Source: www.envano.com
Your customers are constantly talking about various things on social media. These things might be related to your product, or might be general conversations. However, being able to extract information out of such conversations is the trick.
Maintaining track of where your customers are, what they are doing and when they are generally online helps develop marketing plans which can be strategically planned and targeted to customer groups based on their behavior on various social media sites. This helps in reducing advertising costs and also increases the chances to get noticed.
4. Keep track of competition:
Source: smartmarketingforbrands
Social media is one place, where nothing remains hidden. People and brand disseminate information which can be easily accessed. Especially when it comes to brand pages, most information is out in the open. This makes analyzing your competitors better.
Once you know what your competitor is doing online, it is easy to find out what content strategy are they using, when are they most active, what is their target market, which form of content is working for them, so on and so forth. This not just helps in analyzing the strength of your customers but also allows you to design better content strategies, which can perform better and bring back better response results when compared to your competitor.
5. Increase sale:
If you have done the job of informing your customers correctly, and made them feel important, they are sure to stay. In fact, if your content was appealing enough, you might actually outperform your competitors and earn a few of their customers as well. After all it’s about investing “money” and everybody out there is looking out for the best schemes.
Your competitor might actually be hosting better schemes, but have failed to interact with their customers or even keep them informed on a timely basis. You might have just hit the right spot and stolen few of their customers which help in increasing your sales and at the same time earning your brand more popularity.