Is Your Marketing Agency Socially Acceptable?

Recently attended the BOLO digital agency conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. Rather nice place to be in October. And rather good conference.

Learned a lot about what agencies and marketers are thinking in the social and digital space. I’ll post on a few of them over the next couple of days.

Thought I’d at least start by throwing out some facts that one of the speakers shared with us.

These facts strongly suggest that there’s opportunity out there in the social space that is highly untapped.

Consumers are relying heavily on social media and because of this marketers and their agencies need to be creatively thinking about how to engage, how to promote, how to motivate, and how to build loyalty.

Here are a handful of fun facts that you might want to share with your agency the next time you talk about the value of social media:

56% of Americans have a profile in the social space.
58 million Americans use social media multiple times a day.
88% of social media users use Facebook. 34% use Twitter.
40% of consumers expect a response from a Company (when they post a question on a Company’s site) within an hour.
40% of consumers have recommended a product in the social space.
60% turn to a Company’s Facebook page for Company information.
30% have purchased products based on a recommendation from social media.
65% of consumers using Pinterest are pinning food.
56% have clicked on a branded product company’s information/icon on another person’s Pinterest board.

While I know the degree to which consumers engage with your brands varies – by brand and by category – the bottom line here is consumers are engaged in this space. They trust it, they use it, they carry it with them almost wherever they go.

So the question for your agency is how can we better capitalize on all the things happening around us?

With so much activity, how can we make this space better come to life for our brand?

Just because you operate in the B2B space (if you indeed do), doesn’t mean that all of this social stuff is of little value. Your customers are using social – maybe not to buy your products or find them on Pinterest – but they are engaging in forums, talking to others in their profession, visiting Facebook, and their companies are probably active on Twitter. So given they’re there in one shape or another, means you have an identifiable audience in a fairly well identifiable space, so it’s now up to you and your agency to find a way to capitalize on it.