With our social media event only a matter of weeks away, we thought we would whet your appetite with a couple of social media business success stories.
In today’s highly connected world, an increasing number of business professionals and SMES are making social media a key component of their marketing strategy. More and more companies are adopting social media as a channel for connecting with current, past and new customers.

A global survey by Regus has shown that 41% of UK firms are using social media in order to increase their business. The poll questioned around 17,000 managers and business owners from over 80 countries across the world, including the UK, about their use of social media and social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter.

The survey also revealed that 50% of UK firms now encourage their employees to join business networks, and that 33% devote up to 20% of their marketing budget to business social networking activity with the hope of engaging new customers, building brand awareness, improving customer loyalty, and ultimately turning customers into long time fans of their brand.

Celia Donne, Regional Director at Regus comments: “Business social networking has finally come into its own in the commercial world. More and more companies are leveraging the channel not only to increase the loyalty of existing customers, but as a successful acquisition tool. As businesses emerge from the downturn they are increasingly reconsidering pre-recession working practices and opting for more flexible, competitive strategies. Among these, the use of business social media is proving extremely successful and suited to the fast pace of recovery. Particularly in the UK, where one in three social network users is a fan, follower or friend of a company page or profile, firms should expect to see an increasing proportion of marketing budget being destined to this activity.”

The team here at TLC Business recently stumbled across a creative way of taking social media activity to a new level, yes Nike may not be your usual Hampshire business, but it shows its thinking ahead of the game and creating an exciting platform to stand out against competitors and reach a network of past, present and future customers.

Like many companies, Nike felt they needed to shake up their market place online and create something new and different for their target audience. Nike began their search through simple market research in Amsterdam and found out that people thought running was boring and that the youth market showed a lack of interest in this area of exercise. Nike wanted to change this negative view, so decided to launch an innovative online to offline campaign that used Facebook as the main platform. The idea was to create a movement of runners who had to paint their city using the running routes as their artwork. The campaign was a huge success on Facebook with users engaging with each other offline and online and a real sense of community was built up between the runners as they all started to join up and follow each other’s routes that had been created on Facebook.

Obviously we would all like our businesses to be able to create such an exciting and innovative way of engaging with our market place but we also wanted to highlight some Facebook pages that are slightly closer to home and not totally out of reach.

Plum baby, a Hampshire based business has created a highly interactive Facebook page that brings mothers together in an online community to share their baby food experiences, new recipes and advice.

Hampshire based Samantha Russell the Social Sardine helps business get more from their Facebook business pages. Samantha Russell will be a speaker at our Social Media event on the 7^th of July.

If you would like to attend our social media event on the 7th of July and learn more about how Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn can help you business, click here.