Social media: The one stop solution of branding

Social media is a very effective way to communicate online. You can distribute your thoughts to many at the click of a button. This is the reason why sites like Twitter, Facebook etc. are now a days very popular among all the age groups. Not only common people, even marketing professionals find them an effective way to advertise their product virally across the globe.

Some remarkable social media stats are:
The total number of unique visitors to Facebook is 200 Million per month. Similarly for Myspace it is 126 Million and for LinkedIn it is 30 Million. So if you are a marketing professional, whatever is your target area, you can expect great bunch of people who can be your potential customer.

Marketing professionals having product targeted only for a specific group of people (like men or women), face a great difficulty in finding the right set of customers for them. In such a situation also, social media sites can be very effective. According to an estimate, the total number of female visitors to Facebook is about 114 Million whereas the total number of male visitors is about 86 Million in a month. On Myspace the number of female visitors per month is about 81 Million. On the other hand the number of male visitors is about 45 Million per month. Similarly the number of female visitors per month on LinkedIn is about 16 Million whereas the number of male visitors is about 14 million.

If any company is running PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign on Facebook for their website, they can filter the target audience using various filters. One of the factors which Facebook provides to its advertisers is the age group of visitors. While designing your campaign you can select the age group for which you want your ad to be shown. According to an estimate, the majority of visitors to social media sites are within the age group of 18-24. On Facebook almost 46% of the total numbers of visitors lie in this age group. Similarly on Myspace the majority of visitors lie in the age group of 18-24. On the other hand, on LinkedIn this data is bit different. Majority of their visitors are within the age group of 25-34. This is mainly because of the nature of the website which promotes professionals rather than youngsters. Hence almost 50% of the total visits are from the age group of 25-34.

The data about the number of visits on these popular social media sites are enough to proof that using them can be really an effective way to reach our customers. Many companies have started huge investment in this sector to gain more and more customers and build their brand identity. Even after such a huge amount of visits per day, the number of companies who are really benefited from these websites is less. According to a survey the total number of companies who say that they are not at all happy with social media websites for their business promotion is 63%. So a vast majority of companies believe that these websites are not helpful for their marketing campaign. Only 3% of the companies believe that social media websites has helped them grow their business.

The main reason why the companies have not been able to reap the benefits of Social media sites is because their campaigns are not optimized. Also social media should mainly be used for branding a product or company. Many companies expect leads from the visits they are getting from these sites. This is a mistake as the conversion rate will be very low from social media sites. Also if you are running a PPC campaign on Facebook, you should make sure to use all the filters which Facebook has to properly target your ads to the required audience. Filters like sex, age group, location etc. can be very effectively used to optimize your ad campaign.