Most firms are scrambling for online presence to boost sales

In Summary

• Online presence for brands is critical in today’s digital environment though corporates ought to be strategic about it
• A better rank is achieved through search engine optimisation or strategies, techniques and tactics
• Most marketers believe that digital spaces such as Facebook with close to two billion users offer them limitless space to showcase their brands and increase sales

NAIROBI, KENYA: It seems everyone, including companies want more Likes on Facebook or followers on Twitter or Instagram among other socialmedia platforms.

Such a craze seems to be growing each day with brands riding on them to boost sales and marketing of their products and services. With a burgeoning social media, brands are scrambling for online presence like never before.

Most marketers believe that digital spaces such as Facebook with close to two billion users offer them limitless space to showcase their brands and increase sales.

Mouth-watering

Facebook population is about a third of the world’s population, a mouth-watering prospect for any business.

And that explains why companies keep invading the social media like a swarm of locusts invading a farm of corns. They have dominated Twitter and Facebook, outshouting other netizens (online citizens) on any trending discussion.

They are incessantly engaging netizens on every other discussion, some which might be totally unrelated to their core business.

For example, a Tweet by KCB Group, asking soccer fans on Twitter to predict who will win the English Premier League this season after last weekends’ performances. Companies are also always prowling the social media looking out for any hint of a complaint to nip it in the bud or before it morphs into a full-blown public relations nightmare.

They are quick to snap up a simple compliment and spread it throughout the cyber-space. Big brands, not just local but global ones too, have poured millions to amass extra Likes.

Even small online stores such as Ruth Kwamboka’s Facebook page marketing low cost imported dresses from Dubai have not been left behind.

Ms Kwamboka gives Facebook an average of Sh4,000 to gain more Likes. So intense has the invasion of brands on the social media been that it has spawned a new venture, albeit illicit: of brands buying fake followers and Likes. But, how important is having Likes for brands?

Do these Facebook Likes result into increased sales? There has been little that has been done on the local front to show correlations between more Likes and sales.

Tim Sky Media Chief Operations Officer Service Tim Kamuzu Banda says an online presence for brands is critical in today’s digital environment though corporates ought to be strategic about it.

Vast opportunities

The communications firm helps brands deal with “digital marketing and social media management.” The first step for corporates keen on exploiting the vast opportunities on social media “I mean, if you have one follower, he cannot talk to himself.

There have to be many other people who can then talk to each other,” says Kamuzu.

But even more critical, according to Kamuzu, is the need for people to respond to your posts. “Are people responding, or are you getting feedback on your post?” poses Kamuzu, who notes that for this to happen, one has to craft a call-to-action post.

Moreover, for the companies rushing to establish an online presence, it is important that they are ranked better than their competitors on search engines such as Google.

A better rank is achieved through search engine optimisation or strategies, techniques and tactics. These are used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine.

Kamuzu opines that the success of an online presence lies in prompt response. “If it takes you over two days to respond to a complaint on your Twitter handle, then you have no business being online,” he said.

But besides helping with feedback, an online presence needs to also result into increased sales.

A recent research article by Harvard Business Review noted while it is possible that getting people to follow a brand on social media makes them buy more. It can also be that those people followed or liked the brand because, well, they liked it in the first place.

“But it’s also possible that those who already have positive feelings toward a brand are more likely to follow it in the first place, and that’s why they spend more than nonfollowers,” said the article which appears in the March-April, 2017 issue.

But the article did find that platforms such as Facebook can be a good place to gather intelligence about customers which marketers can then use to “build new, more successful social mediastrategies.”