* research by the Office for National Statistics shows that businesses source information through the internet more than every other media channel. So how are they achieving this on the internet precisely?
- Sending/receiving email
- Researching products and services
- Reading news
- Using social media
We don’t think we need to do any research to help anyone better understand the Top 3 but for many the business benefits of the 4th are not clear and as such unadopted.
So where’s your business with social media?
Wrong question really, the far more pertinent question is where your customers and target audience are with social media.
Whatever your business you need to provide your target audience with information about it to find new customers, and then provide your customers with regular information to keep them.
The advent of the internet has seen an explosion in the options open for businesses to source information. As the way we use the internet has developed businesses have been faced with decisions. Through the 90’s the decision of whether to have a website at all faced us and since the late 90’s email marketing was a second landmark decision. Today a website is for all and email marketing for most, but what decisions do businesses have to take today about social media.
Part of the decision making process has to be to evaluate how widely new communication channels are used. Much depends on your target audience and the higher the social and business profile of your target audience *research by the Office for National Statistics shows the more likely they are to be using social media.
So if your customers and target audience are using the internet to search for products/services and read their news more than any other channel, is your business information aligned to their preferences? The *research clearly shows that many are using social media to achieve their business information needs.
Social media is not for all but is for many and better understanding what social media is doing for businesses across the hospitality and catering industry is the key objective of our next social media roundtable.
When we held our first roundtable consensus from delegates representing hotel, restaurant and pub groups was that the business benefits were clearly visible.
To build on that we are now setting out to benchmark how extensively social media is being used, through what channels, which work best for specific business sectors and how ROI is measured.
So if you do use social media and are prepared to complete a very simple survey we will exclusively provide you with the results of that survey before we publish them.
The survey is completely confidential and no information specific to any individual or business will be used in any way other than creating and publishing the report.
There are no prizes for completing the survey such as entering a draw to win an iPad or £500 of vouchers as we only want information from people who value the information they will receive in return as highly as we do.
So please take a few minutes to complete the survey and we will send you the results before they are published. Please also in the survey form let us know if you would like to attend one of our social media roundtable events.
Source of * research by the Office for National Statistics