eBusiness Weekly
Aurra Kawanzaruwa
According to a study cited by Social Samosa, only 1 percent of users who like a business page with visit the brand’s Facebook page. To put this into context for you, if you have 600 000 likes on your Facebook page, only 6 000 of those actually care about what you post.
The rest are just impressive looking numbers for your social media reports. In summary, “likes” are not profit.
In fact, Facebook use in Zimbabwe has dropped by 32,52 percent as of December 2017 to only 54,11 percent from 86,62 percent in December 2016, according to StatCounter. The use of YouTube, however, has steadily increased by 6 percent with Twitter adoption also increasing by 7,1 percent.
Now social media in itself is by no means useless. It has revolutionised the way businesses around the globe interact with their customers and disseminate information.
In Zimbabwe, company expenditure on social media has grown exponentially and businesses have had to “up their game” when it comes to customer service and relations.
Social media platforms themselves have gone through several iterations of evolution to accommodate and adjust to users’ browsing habits and digital preferences.
For example, Facebook is set to roll out an ad unit to Facebook Ads which will allow you to add a button that will redirect the user to a WhatsApp chat or call. This is extremely useful in a country like Zimbabwe where WhatsApp accounts for almost half of all internet traffic based on statistics released by POTRAZ late last year.
So how can a business really make good use of these social platforms? The effectiveness of social media is not in the number of “likes” and “followers” you have, but rather in the connectiveness of your brand. Umair Haque contextualised it quite nicely;
“Attention is a fickle, fleeting thing on which to build a business model, let alone an institution. Hence attention without relation is like revenue without profit: malinvestment.”
This means that you need to engage and interact with your audience rather than focus on building likes. What’s important is not the number of fans you have but the number of people who are talking about your brand. Social Ogilvy put it like this: “The power of Facebook remains its potency to generate earned conversation and engagement.”
Social media is primarily a trust-building platform and because of this your primary sales efforts should not happen via social media. If all your customers see are links to your sales page they are more likely to ignore the posts. If you do decide to sell, try to make no more that 10 percent of your content promotional.
Another very important thing to understand about social media is that different markets use different platforms and have different online habits. Understanding your business and the people who interact with it will help you to identify the right social media platforms to use.
A common misconception is that one must be on every single platform, but time has proven this to be a mistake many businesses fall into. Avoid spreading yourself too thin and pick a few or even one platform that best services your business as well as your clients. For example, if your content is primarily video driven, then YouTube and Facebook may need to be your primary distribution points.
