Sway Personal Use Ebook

Table of Contents

WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCE? 7
USING SOCIAL MEDIA TO INFLUENCE YOUR AUDIENCE 8
SOCIAL MEDIA 101 FOR BUSINESSES 9
TAKEAWAYS FOR THIS SECTION 12
WHY IS SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCE IMPORTANT? 13
YOUR BUYERS LIVE ONLINE 14
TAKEAWAYS FOR THIS SECTION 17
HOW DO YOU BUILD YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCE? 18
HOW TO MEASURE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCE 22
CONCLUSION 26

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Introduction

Welcome to tomorrow. Why, tomorrow when it’s still obviously today? Well, today is not only a temporal measurement, it is also a set of ideas, a group of culturally accepted norms, a way of doing business and a way of looking at the world. Taken together, this collective Zeitgeist represents opportunity in the form of greater connectivity to a wider audience that has the potential to yield increased profits and greater success. The problem is that this group of norms and practices is constantly changing.

In the past, these changes occurred slowly. An average business owner, like you, had the time to pick up on these changes, digest them and incorporate them into a cogent business plan. Today however, technology and the changes it brings have conspired to greatly accelerate this rate of change. As a result, it becomes harder and harder to keep up with the trends and practices that can mean so much to your continued business success. Luckily, there is a solution.

Over the past several years, social media have become an integral part of all of our lives. They are how we connect, share, rate, meet and sometimes judge each other. They also provide us with a never ending stream of new information in the form of posts, tweets, photos and videos. How much information? Well, the statistics just might stagger you.

In 2014, the last year for which complete statistics are available, there was a virtual data explosion. This explosion did not occur gradually over the course of the year. It didn’t even occur somewhat suddenly over the course of a month or a week. Instead, this explosion occurred every minute of every day and it is still occurring today. In fact, it is growing. It is a rolling, unending wave of content that has increased exponentially even during the time that it took you to read this paragraph. Let’s take a closer look at this wave, as well as the content it contains.

In 2014, five exabytes of information were created online every day. What is an exabyte and how much information does it represent? Well, an exabyte equals one thousand petrabytes. Still not clear? That’s not surprising. One exabyte is an almost unfathomable amount of information. It is one quintillion bytes or one billion gigabytes. Even broken down that way, it may still be hard to wrap your head around how much content that actually represents. So to help you understand the enormity of the amount of data contained in one exabyte let’s do a thought experiment. In your mind, go back to the dawn of human history. Go back to the time, thousands of millennia ago, when our ancestors first began to speak and use language. Now go forward and try to imagine every word ever spoken, every word ever written, every picture ever drawn, every song ever sang or played, every film and television show ever produced every radio program ever listened to, and every bit of recorded music captured in any format. That incomprehensible amount of information would equal five exabytes. So, in 2014 we produced enough content in one day to equal all of the information created in all of human history prior to 2014. No matter how you slice it, that’s amazing and perhaps a little frightening.

Specifically in 2014, Facebook users shared nearly three million pieces of content every minute. You Tube users uploaded seventy-two hours of new content every minute. Skype users collectively connected for over twenty-three thousand hours every minute. Yelp users posted over twenty-four thousand reviews every minute. Instagram users posted well over two hundred thousand photos every minute. Pinterest users pinned nearly four thousand images every minute. Twitter users tweeted four hundred thousand times every minute. Amazon made eighty-three thousand dollars every minute. Apple users downloaded fifty thousand apps every minute. Two hundred million e-mail messages were sent every minute and Google received four million search requests every minute. All of this occurred every minute of every day. All of this is occurring, and has grown, every minute, right now, today. It will only get bigger tomorrow.