Have you ever sat in a meeting and thought I worry for the future?
A couple of weeks ago I was sat in a Altrincham Town Meeting and a manager from a rather well known high street store started spouting about how Altrincham businesses should look at QR Codes and Iphone Apps … he also said there was no source of news for Altrincham on twitter, which for those tweeters who read our blogs kind of shows how hard he looked!!!
Now this manager was young – at a glance, maybe 2 or 3 years out of University at most, and exactly the sort of person you imagine a corporate company would go “you’re young, it’s your job to look after our Social Media and all things tech”
As a business I work with a lot of local businesses and knowing your market is key and believe it or not
* A significant amount of Altrincham businesses do either not have email or not check their emails on a daily basis – those that do have email, the response rate is significantly slower than that of businesses in Manchester City Centre
* A large amount do not have websites – and those that do don’t update on a regular basis
* Although 2500 local followers are following our Altrincham news – a large percentage are still yet to join twitter / facebook
And yet despite this there was a suggestion that they would leap over the essentials and take up QR codes and Iphone Apps – it stinks of reading an issue of Marketing Weekly and not knowing your target market
Some interesting stats for you
* Facebook has over 30 million UK users – half the UK population
* Twitter has over 10 million active users in the UK – thats 1 in 6 people
* Only 12% of UK mobile phone users have ever used a QR code
What Social Media platform for you business?
Broadly speaking it’s Twitter / Facebook for B2c and Twitter / Linkedin for B2B but there are slight variants on each so if you have an enquiry about your specific business do get in touch
You might want to look at our blogs on the following success stories so you can see how other local businesses have used Social Media
* Twitter Success Stories In Manchester
* Twitter Marketing For Restaurants
* How one business won an £7000 order on twitter?
* Zipyard – A local casestudy
* Melissa Paxton PR – A local casestudy
I’ve heard about Pinterest and Google + – should I start using them?
In terms of traffic i’m yet to meet a local Manchester business using either platform in a significant way for business
Google + has quite a low user base at the moment, but there are SEO benefits for take up
Pinterest has a predominantly female user base, needs high quality images and in our experience the traffic we have received from the platform has been 90% American. So if something can be shipped internationally rather than having a local focus then it is worth investigating
If you are local Manchester businesses using Pinterest and Google + and have had success – get in touch so we can do a case study on you
QR Codes / I Phone apps?
These deserve a blog in themselves, but I would really suggest getting basics down first before looking at these
If you don’t check or reply to emails, are yet to get any significant wins over social media then QR Codes and particularly the expense of a good App are maybe not right for you
Any other questions on Social Media do get in touch – we are ranked number 1 for Social Media Marketing in the UK by independent customer testimonials on Freeindex
