Video transcript

In this lesson, we talk a bit more about what are social media networks, and why people use them.

There are three main points that I’ll talk to you about.

The first one is, why do people use social media at all?

The second one is, what are the challenges of using social media?

And the third one is, taking into account all the challenges, why would you want to be on social media as a business?

So lets crack on with the first one.

There are four main reasons why people go on social media, and as a business, you will have to figure out which of those reasons or needs can you cater for.

The first reason why people go on social media is to socialise and network. You’ve probably been on Facebook before: to catch up with your friends, maybe chat with them for a while, look at the photos of the places they have visited, and just find out what’s happening in their lives. And you’ve probably previously used LinkedIn to look at the profiles of your colleagues or former co-workers to find out what’s happening in their lives professionally. Or you might have been using LinkedIn to look for people you could cooperate with. So the first main reason is socialising and networking.

The second reason for why people go on social media is for entertainment. To look for some jokes or videos of people making pranks on each other, or just funny videos in general.

A third reason for why people tend to go on social media is to find out about new opportunities that might come their way. So for example on Facebook you might be looking for events that are happening in your area about something that interests you, for example travelling. On LinkedIn you might be looking for job adverts or adverts with opportunities for collaboration. So social media tends to be this really good platform and resource for finding out opportunities.

The fourth one, and probably the most crucial one for the purposes of social media marketing for your business, is educational purposes. Very often we go to social media to find out interesting articles or videos about something that we want to learn more about.

Let’s say you’re interested in travelling. You would then go and look for articles about new places to visit. Or let’s say you’re struggling with something like time management. You might go onto social media to look for interesting articles or videos on how to sort that specific problem. For example to find out what time management techniques you could use.

And this is really important from the perspective of your business. Because this means you can easily target a group of people who are already looking for a solution to a specific problem that your product or service might be solving.

So what are the problems with social media, and using it as a business?

Probably the biggest problem is that there is quite a lot of noise out there. If you think about it for a while, an average potential client that you might be trying to reach out to, through social media, is probably receiving a couple of hundred messages every single day.

So it’s quite competitive and you’ll be competing for the attention of those people. And you will have to make sure that your posts stand out. That they’re interesting, and they make people want to click through and follow up.

Another thing that you will need to be aware of is a way that social media platforms are addressing this problem of too much traffic. They do that by applying different algorithms that help the audience, an average user, to decide which messages they might want to see more of, and which messages might be more interesting to them.

So there are certain technicalities that you will have to be aware of, before using social media for your business. And we will go through all of that and talk you through the whole thing step by step, So don’t worry about it now.

So the question is, taking into account that social media is so competitive, and there is a lot of noise out there, why would you want to use social media as a business?

Well there are very good reasons for you wanting to do that. The first one is that it allows you to reach out to a much wider audience of people than you would normally be able to reach out to. For example if you attended professional networking events or you were trying to reach out by socialising with people face to face, using traditional methods.

The second one is, if you know what to do on social media you can very easily reach out to targeted audiences of people who are already looking for the solution to a specific problem.

Lets say your business introduced a product that helps people who travel. Well it’s quite easy. If you go onto Facebook you can find relevant groups for people who enjoy travelling and are very interested in travelling, and you can pitch your product in there. So you can very easily reach very targeted audiences of people. And this is why it’s really worth using social media.

So I hope this has given you a good idea as to why would you want to use social media as a business, and roughly what are the challenges that you will be experiencing throughout the process of getting onto social media.

In the next lesson we will go one by one through the three main social media platforms: Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. And we will also talk about different platforms that we aren’t covering in this course, and why would you want to use them potentially for your business.

I’ll see you in the next lesson!