You keep hearing friends and clients talk about the advantages they’ve found with using social media to market their businesses but you’re not sure if it’s worth your time. You’ve heard of – and maybe even experienced – some of the downfalls and social media seems to be more of a pain than it’s worth. But the upsides far outweigh the downsides.
According to Oberlo.com, there are 4.89 billion social media users in 2023, 79.1% more than five years ago. If you’re trying to reach people in the United States, 74.2% of Americans have a social media profile with Facebook being the most popular option (both in the United States and worldwide).
Statista also shows 44 million (66 percent of the population) used social media in the United Kingdom as of January 2018 and 3.59 million people in Ireland were projected to use social media by the end of 2019.
But why exactly are those numbers important?
You obviously aren’t going to reach every single one of those billions of people but you will reach a large of number of potential and existing clients inexpensively. If you want a more organic campaign, you can post without paying any money – but if you want to reach more people, there are also inexpensive ways to do that is well.
Facebook boosting allows you to target exactly the kind of audience you want to reach, pick you exact budget, and decide how long you would like the ad to run for. Between the ability to reach exactly the audience you want and being able to reach a large amount of your audience over days of even months for about the cost of one or two ads in a newspaper, using social media marketing is a smart move to get your business seen by many even if you’re on a small budget.
If you don’t want to pay, don’t worry. You’ll still reach people without spending any money (a nice little perk of having a social media presence). There are posts that you won’t want to boost that will still get plenty of attention. Depending on the subject, the organic reach on posts I boost on pages I manage is can be higher than the paid reach.
In fact, 78 percent of American consumers say they’ve discovered products and services on Facebook according to this AdExpresso article. In good news for small businesses, according to Facebook Business from February to May 2020, searches for local businesses rose by 23%. However, keep in mind that paid post do have their advantages with 26 percent of Facebook users reporting in 2019 that they made a purchase after clicking on an ad (otherwise known as a boosted post).
Even better is that Facebook also owns the popular photo-based social media site Instagram so you can chose to run the campaign on both sites and hit two very popular platforms at once.
Hootsuite’s statistics show that over one billion people use Instagram every month with 81% of people using Instagram to research products and 50% of people making a purchase from a website seen on Instagram.
It’s safe to say that both Facebook and Instagram are well worth the money. But what about Twitter?
There is good and bad news with Twitter. Even if someone doesn’t follow you, people retweeting, responding to you, and liking your tweets can put your tweets on non-followers news feeds.
Twitter is a popular place for the international equestrian scene so you can have a big and far reach for free. The great thing about Twitter is that it isn’t as strict on deciding which posts its users see, so you have more opportunity to get in front of those who follow you. In addition, chatting with others can have more of those non-followers see you and decide to check your business out.
In my personal experience, I discover more new farms, horsemen, and products on Twitter than on Facebook because of the retweets and conversations that happen. As another benefit, many of your followers will often retweet big events for your company, with retweets being another way to get keep your name on Twitter feeds without having to pay.
Twitter also gives you the ability to pay for advertising if you want.
The good thing about the Twitter ads is that you can target your audience, but be aware that it isn’t as advanced as the Facebook targeting. The bad thing is that Twitter advertising is easily ignored with people scrolling right past promoted tweets since they look nearly identical to other non-promoted tweets that can come across a feed.
With the Twitter layout and more organic reach, unless you have a specific very big event you want to promote, paying to advertise on Twitter probably isn’t worth doing very often. Though that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a Twitter account at all. As you’re probably tired of hearing, Twitter is a great platform to use to not only get your business’ name out there but also to interact with potential customers both locally and internationally.
Overall, social media is playing a vital role in the equine industry today no matter what your discipline. With the ability to market your company inexpensively and interact with potential customers on a variety of platforms, you can’t afford NOT to include it in your marketing plans.
If you aren’t sure where to start on getting social media accounts up and running, Pyrois Media offers both social media consulting and management services. Email Mbauerherzog@gmail.com for more information.
Have a topic you’d like to see covered here? Email me with your suggestions and you could see it in a future blog!