Stop thinking it is a FAD

Originally I was going to talk to you this week about a really cool metaphor and realization I had as I was traveling to Illinois for the holidays however today I ran across a blog that made my mouth drop to the floor. I somewhat knew this information as this is what I do for a living but to see this information in this type of graphic was surreal to me. In a blog posted on Go-Globe this picture came up:

These numbers are insane and when you think about the internet 15 years ago this truly shows that where you need to be is online and social. Let’s just look and decipher a couple of the things you see!

Facebook – There 3,125,000 likes, 243,055 pictures, and more than 3,000,000 shares. This means that every second over 52,000 likes and 50,000 shares on Facebook. So my question is why are you not one of them? We are doing a lot of Social marketing for clients right now and we are hearing a lot of reasons why they are not already doing it when we first meet with them. "I don’t know how?", "I don’t think we need to?", "I don’t know where to start?" and My favorite is when people say "that social thing is a trend". Let me tell you though social is not a trend. Social Media like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Google + is not only suggested but required in many cases. There are new Social media sites popping up every day and you need to be on as many of them that make sense for your business. We in America need to feel like we know you and trust you in order to do business with you and social media allows you to get your story out to the world and start a relationship before life happens.

Youtube – 2,7000,000 video views, 139,000 hours of video watched and 300 hours of video uploaded. In a June 2016 article by the New York Times they published that Nielsen calculated that the average American watches 5 hours and 4 minutes of TV per day. That is 1,971 hours of TV per year so according to these two statistics that were published a month away from each other people are watching 70.5 times more video on Youtube in 60 seconds then they are in an entire year of TV. Some other staggering things that this shown is that people are watching 1 hour and 39 minutes per day watching media on their phones. As a matter of fact the average American is spending 10 hours and 39 minutes per day consuming media. That is crazy the amount of time we as a human race is spending watching videos. However this is something that needs to be embraced and here at Paragon Marketing Group we create videos IN-House!

Lastly is not one single site. These are reviews. Reviews are another way that the average person can connect with you. In the old days we had a saying “1 good review stays with one person and one bad review goes to ten people” is gone. In todays world it is now “one good review goes to thousands of people and one bad review goes to the same thousands”. This is where reputation management becomes vital to a company’s success. We are constantly receiving alerts about our clients, everything from stories that may be out there or reviews that are the lifeblood of your business. How you handle a review is as important or many times MORE important than the experience itself. I am a believer that nobody is perfect! I expect a bad review once in a while and by taking care of them, responding to them and creating a solution to them in a timely fashion is imperative to what happens to that review.

So in short the digital revolution is not only here, it is here to stay and becoming a huge growth possibility. Whether you use us or one of the other great marketing companies out there, you need to be at the top of the wave. You need to embrace it and work at it. The digital wave is not going away and a lot of times can be a much lower cost per lead than traditional methods. The old days of having a TV commercial and that being the proof that you have made it as a company is gone. This is a huge advantage to the Small Business owner. TV has a time and a place and we know what that time and place is however Digital is where you HAVE to be!

Visit www.paragonmarketinggroup.com