Go Ahead...Jump Into the Fishbowl!

If you haven’t started using social media to market your business, don’t wait another day. Even Facebook has evolved from a way to connect with old friends and collect farm animals to a dynamic business-to-business marketing tool, a way to announce new service offerings with lightning speed, see what your competition is up to in real time, and research prospects and potential employees at virtually no cost to you, except for your investment of time. We’ll discuss that in a minute…

Social media guru, Jeff Bullas, has amassed some staggering statistics on the use of various social media platforms. Would you believe…

• One in every nine people on Earth is on Facebook ( This number is calculated by dividing the planets 6.94 billion people by Facebook’s 750 million users).
• More than 250 million people access Facebook through their mobile devices.
• More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook.
• 30 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook each month.
• YouTube has 490 million unique users who visit every month (as of February 2011).
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 3rd largest (after China and India) and 2x the size of the US population.
• 80% of companies use social media for recruitment. 95% of them use LinkedIn.
• 71% of all companies use Facebook for their businesses. 39% of all companies use blogs for marketing.

(For more, read Jeff’s entire article here.

LinkedIn is a must do for businesses and is typically viewed as the ‘professional’ social media site, although Facebook is becoming more of a player with the advent of ‘brands’ and ‘companies’. YouTube allows you to produce your own video marketing messages and Twitter is like a mini-blog…you share what’s on your mind (hopefully, pertinent information) 140 characters at a time (that should keep you focused!). Personally, I'm not a huge fan of Twitter, and haven't found it to be as effective for businesses as blogging and keeping an updated LinkedIn presence.

Now...back to the time element involved in all of this. While social media should be a component of your marketing strategy, be careful not to make a career of it. Just like surfing the net, it can be addictive and time-sucking if you don’t manage yourself appropriately. The point of using social media, as with any other marketing tool, is to create interest in your business...leave your prospects wanting to know more about your company and what you do. You want your profiles and postings on the sites you use to drive traffic to your web site and entice people to contact you.

So, if you’ve resisted jumping into this 21st century practice which I like to call ‘fishbowl marketing’, think again. How else can you potentially reach a Super Bowl- sized audience with the click of a mouse and not spend a dime? Have fun, make it count and let us know how it works for you!