Social Media And Your Business
If your organization or business has young people as a target audience or target customers, here’s hoping that you are reaching them through your Snapchat page, Facebook site, Pininterest, YouTube or your Twitter feed. Social media and your business need to be together on this if your typical customer is 25 years old.
Surprising no one that follows social media, the most recent data available shows that fewer young people are keeping blogs, and more importantly for businesses, fewer young people are visiting blogs.
The sentiment driving this behavior seems to be a combination of:
- A feeling that writing a blog takes too long
- Low readership of small blogs
- Snapchat, Facebook, Pininterest, Twitter and other sites are meeting whatever needs they have for self-expression
The other side of the coin is young people who used to read blogs are now doing less of it for similar reasons:
- A feeling that reading a blog takes too long
- Snapchat, Facebook, Pininterest, Twitter and other sites are meeting whatever needs they have for information
- Sharing the information with friends and discussing same, or, simply reacting to it, is done more easily and quickly with social media sites like the ones listed here
This is bad news for companies that utilize their blogs in order to get business and inform their customers. Especially, as I mentioned, if a substantial part of your customer base is teens or young adults with their corresponding short attention spans.
Right? It doesn’t matter if it’s on your blog if they’re not reading blogs like before.
Okay, that was the bad news first.
Because there is also data that shows a contrary trend among (30+ years) adults. The writing of blogs, and the reading of blogs, is still increasing in every cohort of adults over 30 years old. And that is very, very good news.
Not to mention that blog content is a great way to light up the Bing or Google search engines like a pinball machine, provided you got the SEO part right. Much better than your typical social media account.
What is the solution to this bifurcation of usage if you’re a business?
Keep writing your business blog. Get a Snapchat page. Get a Facebook page, if you don’t have one. Get a Twitter account, if you don’t have one. If your business lends itself to other types of social media sites, then set up company pages on those sites as well. Update your Facebook page with a link to your new post on your company’s blog. Send out a tweet with a link to that great piece you just wrote about your company’s community efforts, or your new product, or your Spring Clearance Sale. This way, everyone, no matter what their age, gets the news, one way or another, and really, do you care which road a customer travels to get to your cash register or your bulletin board?
I didn’t think so. I wouldn’t, either. Cover all the bases.
But it is good to have the trend information, and now you have it. Don’t say no one told you what was going on. You are now ready to keep doing everything right.
Of course millennials are doing less reading, they are used to the videos now and Twitter’s 140 (well, now 280) characters :)) but I agree, blogging and social media are crucial for businesses operating in today’s day and age.