Facebook Marketing vs. SMS Marketing: Who Owns Your Audience?
For many small business entrepreneurs, creating a Facebook page and promoting products and services to their Facebook community has been key to building brand awareness, acquiring new customers and driving sales. One of the promises of social media has been – if you build a following, you will reap the benefits by being able to tap into this group for marketing and promotion.
Pay To Play
Facebook recently announced, however, that as of mid-January 2015, Page owners can no longer post “promotional” content on their newsfeeds and reach their followers without paying for advertising. According to Facebook’s November 17 post: “Page owners that post promotional creative should expect their organic distribution to fall significantly over time. ”
The Wall Street Journal recently interviewed several small business entrepreneurs on their Facebook marketing strategies. According to one interviewee: “If you’re not paying for it now, no one’s going to see it.” How do potential customers and existing customers who are interested in your business or organization reach you now that the community you built is no longer freely accessible?
Other Ways To Reach Your Community
Forrester Research reported only 2% of fans and followers actually see posts by well known brands on Facebook, and even fewer actually engage with each post. So even without Facebook’s upcoming changes, organic reach was pretty small anyway.
Email marketing is not going away and still plays an important role in reaching your audience. But with average open rates at 20-30%, and click through rates varying depending on content and industry – are you still reaching all the people you want to reach?
What about Twitter? According to the Pew Research Center, only 23% of online adults use the popular social networking tool. The numbers look pretty similar across other platforms such as LinkedIn and Pinterest.
Your Audience Is Yours With SMS Marketing
Affo
rdable SMS marketing is now an even more powerful means of connecting with customers and is no longer comparable to free Facebook distribution. With SMS Marketing, potential and existing customers opt-in to receive marketing messages from you, so your content is targeted directly to the people who want to receive them.
But unlike Facebook, your audience is sure to get the messages you send. Over 97% of text messages are opened and read within 15 minutes of receiving them!
SMS also does not require smart phones or anything to download, which means your potential reach includes just about anyone with a mobile phone.
On top of that, redemption rates for text coupons is 10 times that of traditional coupons, which makes SMS Marketing a truly effective way to reach your audience and incentivize them to take action.
Not yet a TextMarks SMS Marketing customer? Contact us at 800-696-1393 or start your free 14 day trial today.
