Live social media walls are valuable marketing tools whose content can be automated to entertain customers and visitors in your business (and attract new customers from social media).
What is a social media wall? It’s a feed or stream that pushes social content, like tweets or Instagram posts, onto any digital signage display. A social media wall is best used when it has a clear call-to-action that encourages viewers to post to the display using a specific #hashtag or @handle that’s designated to appear on the screen.
Whether your business has a thriving online presence or you still haven’t changed the Twitter profile picture to something other than an egg, live social media walls can be a boon to your online engagement, your brand awareness and your business’ sales. A live social media wall will encourage your customers to talk about your business while they’re visiting it. And when that happens, your customers are actually doing your social media marketing for you. After all, not only have you reached your business’ existing customers, but their social media following, as well.
We’ll look at some of the complexities and other differences that are important to understand for today’s web developers and entrepreneurs here.
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If you’re still not sure whether your business needs a social media wall, maybe a few compelling statistics can convince you.
Here are three impossible-to-ignore social media stats that prove your business should get a live social media wall—yesterday.
1.) 71% of social media users are more likely to purchase from a brand they’re connected with
Source: Social Times Social Media Facts
Credibility and trustworthiness are essential qualities in any business for it to succeed, and part of earning that kind of reputation involves establishing an online presence—having a voice, serving as a resource and being consistent. If potential customers have heard of you, they’re more likely to trust you. And if they see you have not only an online presence, but an army of brand evangelists singing your praises, they won’t hesitate to pick you over the competition.
2.) Tweets with hashtags have 2x the engagement rate
Source: QuickSprout’s How to Use Hashtags to Increase Your Online Presence
Live social media walls are populated by setting tweets to a certain handle (like your business’ Twitter account) or under a specific hashtag (like #YourBiz) to appear there. Customers in your restaurant or retail clothing store, for example, will tweet about your business using your hashtag, and the tweet will appear within moments on-screen—instant gratification for the customer.
Meanwhile, that post will statistically receive twice as many engagements—clicks, replies or retweets. According to QuickSprout, 78% of brand engagements on Twitter are retweets, meaning one post about your business is likely to spread far beyond your network or any single customer’s followers.
3.) Social media produces 2x more leads than telemarketing, direct mail, or PPC
Source: HubSpot Free Report: 2013 State of Inbound Marketing
With a statistic like this, it’s hard to ignore the benefits a well-executed social media marketing campaign can offer. And with a social media wall, that marketing campaign can be as simple as a well-crafted tweet or series of tweets, an enticing incentive and a follow-through.
A simple tweet posted to your account offering some sort of incentive to customers not only intrigues your followers online but, if broadcasted to your display in-store, will target customers already poised to make a purchase. And if that incentive is earned by customers posting tweets of their own, you’ve just generated potentially hundreds (or thousands) of dollars in sales.
Bonus: “We’ve increased our sales by 28%”
Source: Enplug Case Study: La Taqueria
If done right, a social media wall can even help boost your sales. La Taqueria, a Mexican restaurant in San Francisco, uses a social media wall powered by Enplug software to go digital and automate content on their displays, which stream updates from Twitter and Instagram. Before they had a social media wall, the restaurant did no social media marketing of any kind. (In many ways, they were akin the aforementioned Twitter egg.)
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Now, La Taqueria manager Angel Jara calls their live social media feed “an endless cycle of my customers growing my business for me.” In just two months, La Taqueria grew the number of users (or people posting about their business online) by more than 3000% and the number of posts by 6400%. This was the result of the restaurant simply asking their customers to post about their experiences, which customers happily did. Their social impressions totaled more than 116,000 and sales went way up.
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Live social media walls are arguably one of the easiest ways to execute a social media marketing campaign without a lot of brainpower or resources on your end, and your customers will actually enjoy doing the work for you—just ask anyone whose selfie instantly appeared on their favorite store’s screen.
This article was originally published at Enplug.com
The need for a reliable network is currently a big thing for businesses as the need to move data and voice increase. As a result, it is important for you to ensure that your business gets what will work for it for now as well as within the expected growth, especially when data and voice are involved. For this to happen, structured cabling for data and voice is the way to go.