You may be asking yourself if the use of social media marketing is worthwhile for your small or medium-sized enterprise. We have some helpful tips for you.
Social media is booming
Before we go deeper into the topic of social media marketing, we would first like to provide a few numbers which show why your company should definitely focus on social media:
- The Digital Report 2019 recorded nearly 80 million Internet users in Germany – the penetration rate is therefore 96 per cent.
- Nearly half of those (46 per cent) were active on social media in January 2019.
- The percentage of active users who access social media platforms via mobile devices was 36 per cent in January 2019.
- Globally, the number of social media users grew to nearly 3.5 billion at the start of 2019.
- The entire number of social media users globally has nearly doubled since 2014.
The amount of time spent on social media activities varies extremely from country to country; however, the worldwide average is 2 hours and 16 minutes every day.
The most popular social media platforms worldwide are, according to Digital Report 2019:
- Facebook (2.3 billion active monthly users)
- YouTube (1.9 billion active monthly users)
- Instagram (1 billion active monthly users)
Social media: just something for young people?
With social media marketing, you can reach people of all ages. It is correct to say that the largest share of social media users falls within the age group of about 30 worldwide. But the age structure varies extremely on the different platforms. On Facebook, for instance, the number of users over the age of 55 exceeds the users under the age of 18 today. According to the German Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media (BITKOM e.V.), more than half (55 per cent) of German Internet users over the age of 50 use social networks.
Why SMEs should leverage social media marketing
The (marketing) world for small and medium-sized enterprises has changed. Print advertising is reaching fewer and fewer people every year, is still relatively expensive and often has a high scatter loss. Social media marketing, in contrast, is usually more cost efficient and therefore an important part of companies’ online marketing mix.
Most companies leverage social media marketing to prepare content, with the aim of generating traffic to the company’s own website. The second-largest part consists of paid ads, in other words the broadcasting of advertising in social media. Whether this makes sense or not always depends on the company’s goals and social media strategy. After all, paid media is usually less credible than own content (owned) or user-generated content (earned).
Thanks to these measures, social media marketing helps companies to build up a loyal community with customers and prospects, and thus increase the brand’s awareness, generate enquiries, boost clearance sales, offer support or gain opinions, to name just some.
And last but not least, the competition is also usually present on social media channels. According to the German Federal Statistical Office, around 55 per cent of small and medium-sized companies leverage social media for their corporate communications.
Conclusion
Social media offers companies wonderful opportunities for building up an own community, for interacting with their target group and thus for achieving their marketing objectives in this way. However, each company should follow a clear social media strategy in which the goals, the target-group-relevant communities and networks are identified and named, and a precise way to address the target group is defined.
