Are you tweeting? Do you have a Facebook page? If you can’t beat ‘em, join them! Our members are using online marketing/networking for finding friends, classmates, vendors and customers, so we jumped in and the response is overwhelming.
We all look for more ways to promote our business and missions. As your chamber we want to make sure that our members and the community are aware of events and programs being offered to them, with the popularity of online networking; it is great to have another source of getting the information out.
Initially built for college and university students in 2004, Facebook has since grown into a popular social networking website that is open to all. With over 30 million members worldwide, Facebook is 7th most visited site in the United States and sees over 15 billion page views every month. Making a page is fast, easy and most of all FREE! A rapidly growing member-base has made Facebook into viable means to get exposure for your brand, product or website.
Sixty-four percent of retailers/business owners have made investments in social networking and social media while another 22% plan to do so within the next 12 months, according to a new study from Forrester Research Inc. What’s more, 30.5% of retailers say in 2009 social network presences will perform better as a marketing vehicle than paid search or search engine optimization, according to a recent Internet Retailer survey.
“Social networking has gone mainstream,” says Peter Kim, a senior analyst at Forrester Research who specializes in interactive marketing and social media. “As a result, we’re seeing many retailers past the point of experimentation and learning, and now working on use and application.”
Many retailers and social media experts say that if a merchant wants to connect with customers and it’s not in the on-line social scene, it’s missing out—big time. Online consumers, for example, now are spending more time on social networking than on e-mail sites. “If you can be where people are spending so much of their time, that’s the biggest and most effective place to be,” says Dan Shust, director of emerging media at marketing firm Resource Interactive. “You have to get there, then give people things to engage with, things that make them want to come back so you can build a virtual community around your brand. Once you do that, the messaging you can deliver and the information you can provide become much more effective, even more so than mass e-mail campaigns.”
Businesses can go social on their own with blogs, forums and branded social networks on their e-commerce sites. But the focus of discussion and work today is on gaining a presence on one or more of the “big four” social networks: Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter. Of the four, the clear leader, experts agree, is Facebook.
“Facebook is best organized, has the best development tools to work with, offers the most ideal overall demographics, is growing as MySpace crumbles, and offers far more functionality than Twitter,” Shust says. “And Facebook redesigned its fan pages for companies in November. Now they’re brand pages, very sophisticated outlets that allow you to do much more with presentation and engagement. They can run applications within the page on tabs as opposed to having to download them to a user’s page.”
The City of Slidell has accessed Facebook and Twitter for hurricane preparedness and awareness as we are in full swing of Hurricane season. Mayor Ben Morris has promised that the communication breakdown suffered during Katrina will not happen again. The city currently posts frequent public service messages and updates.
If you have not introduced yourself or your business to online marketing, now is the time! You can check out events, programs, workshops, ribbon cuttings and much more on the East St. Tammany Chamber Facebook Page and become a fan through Facebook and Twitter with up to date notices. Check out our website at www.estchamber.com for more information and you will be a click away to joining the online Networking world.