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With a month to go before Christmas, businesses are starting to kick off their promotional campaigns to end the year on a sales high. There are signs appearing in shops, festive banners appearing on websites and email campaigns hitting inboxes – all complete with a dash of tinsel.
But if the recent compilation of Australian social media statistics by SocialMediaNews.com.au is anything to go by, 2012 will be a very social Christmas:
- Facebook has over 11 million members
- LinkedIn has 2.4 million members and rising
- Twitter remains strong with 2.1 million members
- Instagram at 1.5 million users continues to outperform Pinterest with 650,000 members
While these figures are impressive, it’s not just the size of the audience that businesses need to consider. It’s the way these channels are being used that will likely impact your business.
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Google Retail: Online and offline shopping experiences
Google Retail’s recent report on consumer shopping confirms what we have known for some time:
- Customers see no distinction between online and offline shopping.
- Customers are discovering, debating and deciding on purchases ahead of the marketing funnel.
How to move fast this “social” Christmas
You may feel that it’s too late this year to begin thinking about some of these challenges. But the widespread use of social media by your customers will REQUIRE you to participate, or you may see declining sales, increased customer dissatisfaction and impact on your brand reputation.
So what can you do? Here are three tips for moving fast to prepare for a very Social Christmas:
- Listen to your customers: At the very least, you need to listen to your customers via social channels. As a basic level, setup some Google Alerts around your product and brand names. Larger businesses should use a social media listening platform.
- Cover your bases: Do your customers use Twitter or Facebook? Make sure you have a base on each platform that allows people to engage with you. But be selective—you can’t be in all places at all times. Find the best bang for your buck.
- Experiment with promotions: Take just a small amount of time to experiment with the social channels. Use these channels to preemptively deliver customer service, such as links to reviews, recommendations, promotional codes, etc.
Get good advice
While it is easy to get started with social media—setting up a Facebook fan page or a Twitter account can be done in minutes—it’s always worthwhile to get good advice. If you know of a business that is doing social media well, ask them how they did it and who they used. Don’t just believe the hype of so-called gurus. After all, you want it to be a Happy Christmas and a profitable one too!
