The first text message was sent in 1992 and “texting” is now the most common form of conversation in the UK, with the average British person sending 50 messages per week. Back in 1992, to have sent a text to someone within a business context would have seemed disrespectful and lazy. In 2012 it’s the norm. Social Media has also now entered the mainstream. No longer is it the domain of lost souls in chat-rooms during the dark of night, but the way Lord Sugar airs his views on global affairs to his ‘followers’. Even the Queen has a Facebook account.Of course the best way to increase your site or profile traffic is by outsource seo projects
Brands continually innovate and big businesses have been experimenting with social media since 2008 – 93% of businesses now use some aspect of it for marketing, according to Wikipedia. Marketing is historically a much misunderstood department (with many people in the company not really sure what they are doing…!), but throw social media into the mix and the department has become your teenage daughter speaking a different language to you – gr8! The introducers I speak with weekly cover the full gamut, from total technophobes (who are irritated by continual email invites to ‘connect,’ introducing unnecessary malware, compelling them to take their system to an Ipswich computer Shop), to those who live and die by their smart phones; if there isn’t an app for it they aren’t playing!
We all need to accept one definitive fact however – the CURRENT younger generation of investors and would-be pension savers ALL communicate via social media. They live their lives within the ‘country’ called Facebook – which if, incidentally, were a country would be the third largest in the world by population. It is this generation we need to reach out to and educate in how to secure their financial futures for themselves. YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world and this generation are the most visually stimulated and require continual information. With the right message, in the right place, we should be able to convince a large proportion of them that their financial wellbeing is THEIR responsibility.
But let’s not ignore the older generation – who are now accustomed to having the world at their fingertips, via the internet, without even having to leave the comfort of their easy chair. Can you believe that social networking among the over 65’s is up 100% each year since 2010 and that now 1 in 4 within that age group is part of a social networking site? In fact, social media has overtaken pornography as the no 1 activity on the internet (I’m not connecting that to activity in the over 65’s by the way…).
Of course there are the downsides. Facebook is now blamed for 1 in 5 divorces, and data seems to be shared globally in an instant with the individual having no control of their own copyright. Critics would have you believe that survival on the internet is not down to the fittest – but the most opinionated. Certainly many businesses are using the tools of LinkedIn, Twitter and Blogs to create awareness and credibility in a way that smaller budgets simply would not allow in the ‘old world’ of press and TV marketing campaigns.Computers have taken over the world in a way we cannot possibly imagine. Each time there is an issue with the device we find a way to fix it; laptop repairs are no longer a hard thing to fix.
Whether we like it or not, social media and its position within the marketing mix is here to stay. On a positive note, it has spawned many support businesses around it, with multiple small agencies setting up intent on helping you understand your analytics and wanting desperately to ‘optimise’ you. Annoying as the jargon may be, this has got to be a good thing for commerce. Linked In has also taken over as the biggest recruitment site in the world – bad news for traditional recruitment agencies, but good news for businesses no longer having to pay huge fees to get the right people on their team.
In a sector like financial services the key surely is networking – and though there will be those that will continue to use their phone for telephoning and their laptop for emailing, the ones who embrace the other communication channels at their fingertips may well be the people having a wider reach and more beneficial conversations.
I will be writing a series of articles in the New Year looking at the way social media has impacted financial services and the business as a whole, and how best to embrace this new world. Whether you love it or hate it, if you are living and more importantly, working in it, you should at least understand it.
By Claire Robinson