Ask, "Why Is Social Media Important" If You Want New Customers

Written by Michael K. Redman | May 20, 2013

More than ever before good questions are the life blood of leading a succesful company. One of those questions that you must ask on a regular basis is, "why is social media important for reaching new customers?" Every company wants new customers and every company wants those customers to become loyal customers. Social media is the only place I know of that allows you to listen to people talking about their lives, their likes and their dislikes, unrestricted, without ever having to go anywhere! That is why internet marketing is so powerful when done holistically.

Social Media: One Huge Opportunity

Social media is important because it allows you to watch and listen and even interact with people who might be your customers even before they know about your company. Why do so many people share on social media? I have no idea but for some reason hundreds of millions of people are talking about their lives and they don't care who is listening. If you know how to listen carefully to all of these conversations then you know what great leaders have known for years. Listening is one of the most powerful actions in relationship, and finding new customers and getting them to return is all about relationship.

“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

“Most of the successful people I’ve known are the ones who do more listening than talking.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

Social media is important because if you can learn to use it to listen for the keywords that are important in your industry you will be able to engage and network with these people and get the word out about your company and why you are worth their time.

You want to listen for the conversations that have something to do with your industry, but once you find them you will want to learn how to listen in a way that get's their attention. How do you segway into these conversations? One way is learning how to have conversations online and be a better listener. Here is a great Ted talk on 5 ways to be a better listener.

Ted Talk on Listening

Key Tools for Listening to Social Media for Business

Here are three tools we use to listen for keywords in social media and why they are important.

1) Google Keyword Tool

First you want to know the keywords in your industry, and not just what you think but the exact words people are using. The Google Keyword tool is a free tool that let's you see everything that people are putting into the Google search engine. You can take a look at this tool and play around with it. Once you know what people are talking about and the key words and phrases they are using you can use those terms to look a little deeper.

2) SocialMention.com

Socialmention.com is one kind of search engine that allows you to put in your keywords that you found in the Google Keyword tool and search all forms of social media and other types of sites on the web. If you use advanced search commands in Bing you can search a large percentage of Facbook since they are closer friends than Facebook and Google.

3) Hubspot

For all of our internet marketing accounts we use a software called HubSpot. This allows us to keep several different activities for internet marketing in one place including social media. In fact this month they are putting out a significant upgrade that allows you to search, listen and comment on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. It does not do everything we want but it does a lot and because we don't have to go to several differant piecese of software we save a lot of time which means we can be even more effective in our social media efforts.

So there you go. I want you to ask, Why is social media important all the time. Hopefully you will begin to see that it is and you will get involved in the conversation. It sounds trite but business always goes back to people exchanging one thing for another and the relationship they have.

This blog is meant to be a short article but if you want more information on the power and value of social media subscribe to our blog or maybe even give us a call. We didn't even get to how you best use it for a return on investment. That's coming!

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