Transcript:

Ryan Perry, Simple Biz Support. Today is Wednesday, November 25th. It is Social Media Wednesday, therefore I have Sarah Giometti with Provaro Marketing on the other side. Good morning, Sarah.

Sarah Giometti: Good morning, Ryan. How are you?

RP: I’m doing good. It’s going to be the last full day in the office, and then I plan on sleeping in tomorrow, eating some turkey, watching football, and just kind of being your typical American guy tomorrow.

SG: Sounds like a really good plan.

RP: I like it. And then I’m hoping… I might have to come into the office on Friday, we’ll see what happens, but it’ll be a partial day. Today, you want to talk about some statistics, 10 statistics about social media for those business owners maybe that are still dragging their feet. Maybe they’re a little bit old school, and just believe face-to-face is the only way to go. But there’s really some strong data out there. These are hard black-and-white numbers that we’re looking at as to why your business not only needs to be on social media, but really, I think what’s more important is being active on social media.

SG: Right. I still have a lot of businesses that are not… They’re not on social media, they’re not online really, they maybe have a website, and they’re really wondering why… Do they really need to do it, especially older… I don’t want to say older businesses, but old school where they’re used to doing traditional marketing. They’re not quite sure why they need to switch to digital marketing, and so Social Media Today had this great article that I thought would be a good one to cover because they had 10 facts about why businesses need to be online and need to be on social media.

RP: Right. And what’s nice about the article is they already crunched all the information, and it’s specific to a number of different social media accounts. So why don’t we just go through and start with number one?

SG: So number one, global internet users is now over 3 billion, which is almost half of the entire population of the world. So there’s no way your clients are not on social media when half the population of the world is online. And so you just… You can’t ignore it anymore, it’s a huge penetration. And with what Facebook is doing with internet for… They’re doing global internet stuff to get even people in remote areas access to internet, that this number is just going to skyrocket as those things come to fruition.

RP: Right. And you think about that number, half the world’s population is connected to social media in some way today. If you really boil that down and go, okay, US-based business, you actually are in a city that has easy access to the internet. What percentage of those people? I know we don’t have those numbers, but as a business owner you got to go, “Hey, if half the world’s population… ” And we know a lot of people do not have internet access, but half of them do. It’s got to be close to… It’s got to be 90-95%, I’m guessing, in the United States in populated areas.

SG: Yeah, the last stat I looked at is… Probably about a year ago, I saw that stat and it was about 89-90% was on… Is on social media and… Or maybe not social media, but they’re definitely on the internet.

RP: And I think… And I don’t know if we get into this at all, but a lot of people… It’s not about… So many people are worried about making money. Yes, that’s important. But a lot of this is also about building brand equity and creating visibility. And social media just makes it really, really simple. Even if you’re not a hundred percent sure what to do, just getting your brand out there and creating a positive brand experience before you really worry about the conversion factor. If you’re not able to afford a social media expert like Sarah, it pays big dividends down the road when you are ready to make that step and go, “Okay, now I have visibility. I have a community that’s following me. How can I start converting that?”

SG: Right, and it’s… Well, I tell the clients all the time that social media is a marathon. You spend a lot of time training to run the marathon, and then the marathon takes a really long time to actually run. So you want to view social media the same way. You’re building brand exposure, you’re building a community slow and steady over time. And yeah, down the road, if you start building it now, even if you’re not going to do a ton with it, down the road if you have an active engaged community, you can leverage it. If you got a big rollout coming out, you’ve got big sales, you can really leverage it because you’ve already spent the last few years building it. So it’s definitely something you cannot ignore any longer as a business owner.

RP: Okay, perfect. And before we stray too far off topic because I could beat this to death, why don’t we… Why don’t we go ahead and continue down the list?

SG: So that was an internet marketing stat or internet stat. So as for social media, there’s over 2 billion users on social media platforms, and it’s about 30% of the global population. And that’s a pretty big number of users on social media. So again, and we go back to that’s global. So in the United States where people have easy access, the numbers… Depending on your target market, the numbers are anywhere from 50 to 90% of your target market is on social media.

RP: Yep. I will agree with you.

SG: And then the next stat they have on there is mobile. So mobile is becoming a bigger and bigger deal because every… More and more people are having smartphones, they’re accessing their social media on… Their social on mobile phones, and there are 3.7 billion unique mobile users as of the last quarter. And that’s 51% worldwide penetration, so 50% of the world is on smartphone. Again, if you equate it to your city, you’re most likely in America, equate it to your local city. Start looking around, I don’t think I know… I know maybe less than a handful of people who don’t have an actual smartphone. So this… Mobile is just something you cannot ignore any longer, especially if you’re doing social media.

RP: Yeah, and I… The other thing I want to say is on Internet Marketing Thursday last week with Virginie, we were talking about web design and how intelligent programming is getting for mobile devices. It used to be, just a couple of years ago, you had a responsive website that essentially it took your regular website on a computer screen and shrunk it down. Nowadays, we’re really… The programmers are getting really smart about mobile because so many people are on mobile that your website on a computer screen might look like this, but once it shrinks down to mobile, the message, the imaging, the type of content, the lay out can be completely different simply because there’s that many people on mobile that you need to make sure that your message is compelling on a mobile device.

SG: Right, yeah. It’s just… And that’s only going to grow. That’s the thing… That’s the most important thing for business owners to understand is the mobile use is only going to go up. So you want to make sure, yeah, you’re mobile… Your website’s mobile-friendly, you want to make sure your social media is on there. If you’re running ads, say on Facebook, you want to make sure you’re selecting the mobile option so that mobile users are seeing your advertising. You definitely want to pay attention to this.

RP: Okay. So speaking of mobile users, how many of them are actually on social media?

SG: That… 365 million active mobile social media users. Oh wait, no, that was… ‘Cause we skipped one. So that was added in the last year. An incredible total growth of 541 million for social media. So we’ve skipped a step, actually. There…

[chuckle] There are… Social media users have risen by 176 million in the last year, and that’s overall. And so… And then 365 million active mobile social users have been added over the same time span over the last year. And so that’s a total of 541 million added users between everything and mobile in the last year. So again, even if your target market a year ago was… Only 50% on social media, that’s just growing. You’ve gotta remember that we all get older every single year, and people tend to forget that, yes, Mark Zuckerberg started this when he was in college, but he’s in his 30s now. His… Him and his wife are having a baby. We’re all getting older. Gen X so… Those numbers and your target demographic are just going to get bigger over time.

RP: Right. And I’ll tell you, my mom is going to be 70 not next year but 2017, and she is computer illiterate. She basically, if she needs anything, I do it. And then, too, she writes everything down on a piece of paper so that she knows exactly how she does this, this, and this in order to accomplish whatever she wants to do. Maybe three years ago, she got her first iPhone. That woman is a social media junky, Facebook specifically. But the usability, the… How easy… Apple with the iPhone and the iPad has made it easy for a lot of people, she lives on social media and she loves it.

SG: Yeah, and so… And that’s approaching 70. So any business who tells me their target market’s not on Facebook, it’s not true. Whereas, my mom because… I think it’s part of what… Because of what she does for a living. She’s there, but not really there. She’s there to look… She looks at all our stuff, and then she calls us and says, “Hey, I saw blah, blah, blah on Facebook.” So like I said… So they’re still there, even if they’re not acting the same as the 18 to 40 crowd. They’re still on there, you can still advertise to them, you can still get information out to them.

RP: Right. You’re saying that they’re on and watching versus being on and actively updating and posting pictures and those type of things.

SG: Correct. Or they’re like your mom who just embraced it and is on and active too. Got both ends on the older generations, but… And then again, we’re all getting older. I’m… I’m sadly approaching 40 so…

SG: And I’m on it obviously all the time, that’s what I do for a living. But you defintitely… Every demographic is there, you just gotta find the right platform to find them.

RP: Alright, perfect. And then heading down the list. What we’ve got next?

SG: Yep. Facebook adds half a million new users every day. Every day, that’s a big growth. And I know… I think they hit 1.6 billion recently. But half a million users every day. So again, it just keeps showing you have to be there. All these facts to show you every… Eventually, everybody is going to be on here.

RP: Right. And I just read an article today where a gentleman has spent three million dollars on Facebook advertising. Why? Because it made him money. He didn’t just start out spending $100,000 a week or something, he started out small. He figured out what worked. It’s a sales funnel. If you can put 10 dollars in a sales funnel and get a 100 dollars out the bottom, why not put 20 dollars and get 200 dollars out? Why not put 100 dollars and get 1,000 dollars out. It’s really basic black-and-white math. It’s really not something you should be afraid of, you just need to make sure you educate yourself and take things in small so that you don’t make the mistake of spending 100,000 dollars when you don’t know what you’re doing.

SG: Right, yeah. You definitely want to start small, start playing with it, see if it works. But it’s definitely effective, there’s a reason advertisers use it. We’re almost out of time. Mobile users constitute half of the world’s population and two million smartphones are sold worldwide every single day, and granted some of those people are upgrading…

RP: Two million phones every single day?

SG: Right. And granted some of those people are upgrading their phones to a newer phone, however a lot of those people are new smartphone users throughout the world. So again, it just emphasizes the mobile. And that goes on with the next stat where there’s 12 new active mobile social users are added every second, that’s one million per day. So of all the people that are used to using a desktop as they’re buying these new smartphones or upgrading, a million of them a day are adding social media to their phones and starting to consume social media on the mobile platforms as they upgrade to smartphones or upgrade their smartphones.

RP: Yeah, I think the numbers are overwhelming. It’s very, very powerful. And I think the biggest confusion is with a lot of people, and we’ve talked about this before, is that, “Okay, great. Yeah, I need to be on social media, but there’s 20 different platforms that I can name off the top of my head. I don’t have time to manage 20 platforms.”

SG: Right. And you don’t need to… You don’t need to be on 20 platforms, and we say this almost every episode. Find the one that has your target market, start with that one and do it really, really, really, really well. Once you’ve got it consistently done, it’s performing really well for you, then you can look at adding a second one. So you don’t need to go, “Oh my God, I have to be on all nine.” And you don’t. I do, Ryan does, but you don’t.

RP: Right, right. Alright, was that all 10 or is there one more?

SG: Yeah, that was nine. So that last one is WhatsApp is a cross platform messaging, so it goes across all the different devices. It’s mobile messaging, so kinda like text messaging or Google Hangouts, and it’s a cross platform. And they gained 300 million new users since this time last year, so as of August. That’s a year on year growth of 60%, so it just reinforces that people are using their phones for their communication and for their social media consuming. When a cross platform mobile messaging app increases 60% in one year, it just hammers home that you gotta be on mobile and people are consuming their news, their social media, their communities online and on their phones.

RP: Yeah, definitely. Alright, with that we’re actually out of time. That is this episode of Social Media Wednesday. Hopefully, some of those numbers that we gave you kind of make a real impression on your brain of how important social media is. It’s not something that, “Eh, maybe next year.” Well, I guess next year because it’s only a month away. But you need to get online now, pick a platform, and just get your toes wet. You gotta start somewhere because once you start doing something, you gain confidence. And with confidence, you’re willing to try new things and get better. Sarah, I hope you have a great Thanksgiving tomorrow. We will be live next week, same place, same time, to share some more exciting social media information.

SG: Thanks, Ryan. Have a happy Thanksgiving.

RP: Alright, everybody, take care. I hope you have a great Thanksgiving. We’ll see you next week.