Social and Mobile – what can you do?
Well the jury’s been out and now they’re back and the resounding verdict is SOCIAL and MOBILE.
How did it come to this, we were all getting on so well together and now it’s all unravelling, I want to talk about things like SEO, Marketing, Adwords and other ways to move our websites forwards.
Instead, I find everything has gone back to the drawing board… so what’s going on:
Random Web Statistics from random websites that I run (no names):
– A Cleaning Company: 1741 desktop 485 mobile
– Tree Company: 26949 desktops 10082 mobile
– Gardening Company: 1876 desktops 494 mobile
– Ski Chalets Company: 430 desktops 138 mobile
The evidence is overpowering and we have well and truly entered the age of Mobile.. we used to worry about catering for 10% of the audience that viewed websites on the small screen or IE6. But times have moved on and yet website owners often dismiss Mobile as something to do later.
That is wrong – on average 25% of the audience is now looking at your website on a mobile device… this cannot be put off any longer.
For my part, I design for mobile-first now and then make the mobile website fit the desktop. It’s simpler, clearer, easy to navigate and allows us to get the key message across faster.
Moving onto Social… I want to drop the term Media – as it no longer describes this correctly – Social is about engagement with your customers… If you walk into a bar and see a client – would you ignore him? If you run a market stall would you not ask about the weather, not enquire about your customers’ health. We’re all social and it’s making and breaking companies daily.
However, there is a NEW element to Social that I think is worth going through:
- News delivery – most news can be delivered socially, you know the buttons that say Facebook or Tweet this. You as a business can pump out information and most of it can be automated.
- Customer Service – less well used… if you want to complain about a service or product try doing it on Twitter, your problem will be resolved almost immediately, this is because your complaints will be heard in the open. Great customer service is a win-win all around, and using Social to do it means you can provide customer service in a very open and immediate way – living proof of the integrity of your company.
- NEW – Platform for Sharing – A very common grievance from business owners is the lack of stories, news or ‘stuff to say’ on the Social platform. Well, there’s no need to worry. A key target of all Social is to give your customers a place to air their views on your products. If you get your customers contacting you via Facebook or Twitter – they will a) come back for more and b) have their views read by other people with the same interests.
Let your customers do the talking.
Ultimately we can let the numbers speak for themselves, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter may daunt you or put you off, it may not be your thing, but look at your statistics, check your Google Analytics and you’ll be hard pushed not to see Facebook appearing in the top 5 referring websites to your website.
Why is this? Simply put – it’s because even though you might be doing little to promote your website on Facebook – your customers are. This needs to be channelled and controlled so that you can reap the benefits of Social – but remember let your customers do the talking.
It’s easy to ignore both SOCIAL and MOBILE – but that is a BIG mistake. If you want to know the easiest, best and most effective way to implement these strategies for your website let us know because this does need your attention.