This week I was invited to speak on Social Media Strategy at a seminar organised by the Greeting Card Association @GCAUK at Birkbeck University in London. Blue Eyed Sun has had quite a bit of success using tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and our wedding stationery business, Ivy Ellen, has even been used as a case study in the Prentice Hall book Get Up to Speed on Social Media.
The class was well attended with delegates including many well known greeting card businesses including @Woodmansterne, @Paperlinkcards, @The_Art_Group, @LensIdeas and @Gemma_Int. Attendees learned how to set up a business Twitter profile and how to create a Facebook page for business. Soula from @TheLondonStudio spoke on her experience using Twitter and James Mace told us about the success @TheArtFile were having on Facebook.
If social media is completely new to you, the first thing to be aware of is that whilst social media is relatively young it is not used exclusively by the young. The following are some examples of social media tools and when they were launched: LinkedIn (2003), Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), Twitter (2006), Pinterest (2009), Instagram (2010), Google+ (2011). To give you an idea of how extensively they are used, Facebook is accessed by 1 in every 7 people in the world and they spend an average of 15hrs a month on it. It’s used by people across all ages, creeds and colours. 57% are female, 43% are male. Incredibly, one of every five web page views online is on Facebook. Twitter has over 30 million users in the UK and the following age groups 25-34, 35-44 and 45-54 each make up around 20% of tweeters so it’s not just our youth that are babbling on about what they had for their lunch. In fact many of top politicians, journalists and business people have Twitter accounts and they are increasingly valuable tools for them.
So what does this all mean for you and your business? Well, there is one of the largest social gatherings in history going on right now and if you are not involved you could be missing out. It’s not enough for us to have a website for our business anymore, our customers are spending more and more time online and they want to interact with us using tools they are familiar with. More and more people are choosing Facebook messaging over email. We recently took our first order via Facebook instead of email! When we look for new restaurants we are asking our friends online for recommendations rather than just searching Google ourselves. Even search engine optimization is being influenced by these tools, so if you want to show up on Google searches you can’t ignore them.
The seminar was incredibly useful for everyone who came and I am sure the @GCAUK will be doing more in the future so do follow them on Twitter. You can read more about social media each month in my new column for Greetings Today and here on this blog over the coming weeks.
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Download the Small Business Guide to Social Media by our friends at Sage by clicking here
