Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Social media marketing is not just a trendy word, it is fast becoming and in some cases already is a viable acquisition channel for most businesses.

In fact, Hubspot reports that 70% of business-to-consumer marketers have acquired a customer through Facebook. If you are still having trouble convincing your boss that social media is worth the investment, here are 28 must see statistics for 2013 to make him/her jump on board....

If you work in digital, you're probably getting a bit tired of the ROI question by now. We are all tasked with justifying our pitches and projects with proving where the ROI lies directly.

...Since it’s physically possible to buy from the place that you’re running your digital campaign, we’ve assumed that this is how we judge success. That’s where we’ve gone wrong, and where we will keep going wrong. We’ve thought that because you can just be a click away from buying a product or converting on a website, if users don’t do that straight away, it’s a failure. So the ‘trust’ remains in costly methods such as TV, which will never be expected to prove this because they can’t.

Buying Behaviour

To understand this, we need to think about the process of how we buy something versus what we engage with online. A recent study released by Invodo found that consumers are 174% more likely to buy something after watching a video about it online. While this is a wildly encouraging figure that will probably need to be toned down a bit, this finding in itself is significant. The fact that we’re more inclined to buy something from a brand after engaging with it online is what’s important. An increased likelihood to buy is all that should ever be asked of an online campaign, particularly one that is content led. To force a transaction at that point, or to judge that as an indicator of success is detrimental....

Think you’ve got the social media thing down at your business? Think you’re squeezing every last bit of benefit by utilizing online marketing across a variety of social platforms?

Think again. Because there’s no way you’re getting the most bang for your social media buck if you’re only using it for marketing. Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes tells Fast Company that according to a McKinsey report, social technologies have an untapped business value of $1.3 trillion. “And most of that comes from improved office productivity,” says Holmes. “In the year ahead, expect enterprises to embrace social media tools – including internal networks, real-time chats and wikis – for uses that go way beyond the familiar applications for marketing and community building.”

How can you tap into some of that value? Here are a few of the departments besides marketing that could be making good use of social networks...

Overall usage on social media platforms is exploding. Millions and millions of consumers are expressing likes on Facebook, tweeting about products on Twitter, and pinning on Pinterest every single day. Retailers and brands are therefore increasingly focusing their attention on social commerce. But, many struggle with the question: how do you convert a "like," a "tweet," or "pin" into a sale?

In a new report from BI Intelligence, we look at successful examples of businesses and business models for generating commerce via social media-based strategies, analyze Pinterest's success as a social commerce platform, look at Facebook's potential as a social commerce contender, and examine the e-commerce conversion and order value gap. Here's an overview of the converging trends that promise to transform social media into a viable commerce platform....