How SOCIAL is your business?

What do you think about when you hear the terms Social Media and Social Networking? Do your eyes glaze over and you say- I don’t have time, or who cares, or my customers don’t use it?

Like it or not it’s here to stay and actually engulfing and changing the way we do and think about business. Today the trend is shifting to include ‘Social Business’. You say your customers aren’t using it? Then they are fooling you!

All three of the major global social networks, Facebook, Google+, and Twitter are growing by leaps and bounds. “Data collected in GWI.8 (Q4 2012) demonstrates the continued shift in usage from localized social platforms to global ones with huge growth for Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. The fastest growing network in 2013 in terms of “Active Usage” was Twitter which grew 40% to 288m across our 31 markets (approximately 90% of global Internet population). 21% of the global Internet population now use Twitter actively on a monthly basis. This compares to 21% actively using YouTube, 25% actively using Google+ and a staggering 51% using Facebook on a monthly basis.”

Just because you don’t want to change doesn’t mean the world around you isn’t. The Cro-Magnon made that mistake. People don’t do business with companies. They do business with people. And people tend to be social creatures. What are you planning to do about your ‘socialisation’?

One can often be lead down a beautiful garden path without knowing it’s a carefully crafted distraction from real life. And stats are often skewed to the USA, but what about New Zealand? Ponder this:

New Zealand is used as a petri dish by Facebook, and for a few other recent technological advances (text messaging and EFTPOS / debit card payments, to name two notable examples) – obviously because we’re a small, tech-savvy country with a fairly static population. With Facebook we were the first country to all be pushed onto the Wall format – and at the moment we have threaded comments in replies (eg, you can ‘reply’ to a specific comment).

An interesting things is that nearly all statistics derived from NZ are skewed because of the small population size and the fact that NZ is at once both very isolated and very modern. Every other week I see new stats saying “NZ leads world in _____ “, everything from suicide to cannabis use to freedom to food safety to female parliamentary representation to spending to sheep searches. As Nate Silver would say, “NZ is noise on the data graph of world statistics.”

Do you want to be social to catch up with ‘other’ business or your competitors? Or do you want to accept the fact that 62.9% of the online population of NZ is on Facebook? And that the largest audience is the 18-44 year olds? What if you didn’t change- what if you stayed the way you are right now and target the 37% that are not using Facebook and do things and live life differently- perhaps they even prefer the way you are doing business now- without being online and social?

I ask- is this 37% your target market?

Are they happy with the status-quo or are they uncomfortable with change and reluctantly yearn to be included?

Are they wondering what all the fuss is about, scared of being left behind and are slowly learning how to be social?

Or are they a bunch of social misfits, never to be seen, close the curtains, collect a benefit, and only buy food, beer, rent a flat and watch Sky TV all day?

Or is your clientele part of the 242,000 local fans of Air New Zealand? Or one of the 268,000 local fans of MacDonald’s NZ or the 181,000 local fans of Coca-Cola NZ? Check out the top pages in NZ.

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If you’d like to know more about ‘what it means to your business and how to do’ we can start with a social coffee and a chat. An appointment is easy- call me. Christchurch, in New Zealand. Yep- local business.

SpinWeb.co.nz – helping local business in the online world.