With Great Reward Comes Great Regret: the merge to social media

A few months ago I began to explore the possibilities of shifting my marketing efforts to social media for a B2B company and the results were......Intriguing? At first, I was completely against the matter as many would, but with my persistence, I began to realize the full potential of social media as a viable marketing outlet. The Question is how much potential?

I started my study with an extensive search for the very most important aspect of any company...the client. I hardly found any of a our clients on any social media site and I thought to myself, "Well my job here is done." Then the question came to me, why? Why aren't they using social media?

It's simple really. You have to understand your market to obtain the source for the question. I took at a look at the demographics within the industry and found that there's a serious gap between cohorts. You have the Pre/Post Baby Boomers, late Generation X, and early Millennial Generation. Now look further into the matter. I don't want to stereotype people but I found that many Baby Boomers are Luddites to where the Generation X's and Millennial Generation's are open minding to change.

So getting back to the subject what does this have to do with social media? It's simple. I took a quick survey to find out the reasons being why they aren't responsive to social media and I found 3 categories.

1. Knowledge of Social Media
Over a third who responded weren't resistant to social media, they just don't understand how to use it. Every single person who fell under this category were open to social media and wanted training.

2. Identity Theft
A little less than a third of responses were worried about the possibilities of having their identity stolen or the feeling of being "too" exposed to the world and losing their privacy. I did ask if they were familiar with how the social media sites operated and they failed to answer the question.

3. Not Interested/Busy
The remaining few responses were completely resistant to social media with either a response of being not interested or too busy to keep up with social media.



So what do you do? You have half of your target market using social media and the other half left in limbo. My solution is quite simple in thought Problem/Solution. After identifying the top 3 concerns to social media I'm implementing a plan to counteract their problems.

1. Informative/Educated Response
Engage your audience by education. Schedule a webinar and invite your specific audience to take part. This webinar could tackle the major concerns regarding social media and how to work around those problems.

2. Push the Matter
Push social media onto your audience. The more they see your involvement could give the extra push to join various social media sites.

3. Plan for the future
You may come to the conclusion that the older audience may be completely resistant and a waste of your time, in this case plan for the future. The reason being is that The Baby Boomers won't always around, and many companies are planning for this. Plan to engage the younger audience, once they move up the ladder they will be the major keys in a company.


For more questions regarding my findings or discussion on Social Media, Don't hesitate to contact me.

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