Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2011, and its user figures, 13 million Facebook users in Spain and a similar number on Tuenti, are from that month. Tuenti later closed as a social network and became a mobile operator.
Your business or company needs to be on social media. And not only that: these days a company’s professionalism and importance are measured by its popularity on social networks. The more followers or fans it has on Twitter and Facebook, the better its commercial image. I don’t agree with that way of thinking, but the truth is that the human subconscious really is that “primitive”.
Everyone knows how to open a Facebook or Twitter account, and every company knows how to create a Facebook page, yet very few are able to turn that into real sales or potential customers.
In the United States, business ideas have already sprung up around Facebook, with firms that literally present themselves as “marketing agencies specialised in Facebook”. One of these agencies is probably behind the recent popularity of Charlie Sheen, who gained more than 2 million followers in less than a week and then started recommending products and getting paid for it.
Other companies on Facebook have millions of fans, and believe me, in a high percentage of cases these marketing agencies are behind it.
So once you have the raw material (the followers or fans), the whole job is turning those fans into potential customers: designing a sales strategy, recommending products through key contacts and steering people towards websites that encourage impulse buying.
If you can put together a team of professionals able to offer that to a Spanish small business or a large company, you could have on your hands a business with a turnover of more than 1 million euros in Spain alone. After all, Facebook has 13 million users in Spain, with roughly as many on Tuenti (a Spanish social network), not to mention the growth potential of Twitter.
Featured image: Rawpixel Ltd, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
