Social Media Platforms Businesses Want To Learn More About

Have you stopped learning and growing?

Sometimes do you feel it’s too much effort?

Do you feel like your falling behind?

Social Media is an ingrained part of today’s society. Businesses and individuals are constantly on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube. Social media has changed the way people communicate and share information in their personal and professional lives.

Sometimes the lines get blurred between personal and business on social media platforms. With so many changes learning has become a necessity for most.

Where is the future headed with social media?

Where are businesses focusing their learning efforts? Are there some tea leaves that businesses are reading to chart future direction for them and their team?

Success leaves clues…so does social media.

Look around you and you’ll see Video is the hot trending marketing tool of the future, until something comes along to replace it like Virtual Realty.

So if businesses know it intuitively, why are so few doing it?

Time
Fear
See No need
Lack of Knowledge

Knowledge instills confidence, Confidence instills enthusiasm, and Enthusiasm sells!

SOCIAL MEDIA LEARNING

We are in a knowledge based business world. Things are changing so rapidly that we must adopt. As my father taught me, the day you stop learning is the day you die. He lived that until he drew his last breath.

Daily I see businesses and individuals falling further behind. Many may look up one day and find their business or industry innovated them out of business. Just look around you at the businesses that are no longer in existence.

Look not further than your local retail mall.

Continue to learn new skills, challenge your comfort zone.

Social media platforms marketers want to learn more about

You may ask why people still want to learn more about Facebook? Facebook changes are constant. They are constantly tweaking and innovating. Hard to keep up. I didn’t get the memo…did you?

Besides in a business day where crisis after crisis comes out of left field, meetings to discuss upcoming meetings, 100+ emails flying across your screen,throw in Social Media and you want to scream. Time is precious, yet we still need to carve out time to learn or be heaped upon the dust pile of businesses gone south.

So how do we go about learning?

First, we must have a desire to learn with an expected outcome.

Good learners are curious – They wonder about all sorts of things, often about things way beyond their areas of expertise. They love the discovery part of learning. With the internet you have information with just a click!
Failure frightens good learners, but they know it’s beneficial – It’s a part of learning that offers special opportunities that aren’t there when success comes quickly and without failure. In the presence of repeated failure and seeming futility, good learners carry on, confident that they’ll figure it out. Face your fears!
Good learners make knowledge their own – This is about making the new knowledge fit with what the learner already knows, not making it mean whatever the learner wants. Good learners change their knowledge structures in order to accommodate what they are learning. In the process, they build a bigger and better knowledge structure. It’s not enough to just take in new knowledge, you see knowledge is potential power. It has to make sense, to connect in meaningful ways with what the learner already knows.
Good learners pursue understanding diligently – A few things may come easily to learners but most knowledge arrives after effort, and good learners are willing to put in the time. They search out information—sometimes aspiring to find out everything that is known about something. They read, analyze, and evaluate the information they’ve found. They talk with others, read more, study more, and carry around what they don’t understand; thinking about it before they go to sleep, at the gym, on the way to work, and sometimes when they should be listening to others. Good learners are persistent. They don’t give up easily.
Good learners recognize that a lot of learning isn’t fun – That doesn’t change how much they love learning. When understanding finally comes, when they get it, when all the pieces fit together, that is one special thrill. But the journey to understanding generally isn’t all that exciting. Some learning tasks require boring repetition; others a mind-numbing attention to detail; still others periods of intense mental focus. Backs hurt, bottoms get tired, the clutter on the desk expands, the coffee tastes stale—no, most learning isn’t fun.

B2B VS. B2C

B2C marketers are more interested in learning about Facebook (77% B2C vs. 65% B2B), Pinterest (49% B2C vs. 37% B2B), and Instagram (60% B2C vs. 47% B2B) than their B2B counterparts. And B2B marketers are far more interested in learning about LinkedIn (72% B2B vs. 55% B2C) and SlideShare (34% B2B vs. 24% B2C).

What follows are social platforms marketers are interested in, based on how long they’ve been using social media marketing.

Notice the fascinating differences between B2B- and B2C-focused marketers.

Clearly Facebook dominates in the B2C space (65% of marketers select it as their number-one choice). However, for B2B marketers, LinkedIn plays a much more important role, surpassing Facebook.

Marketers with less than 12 months social media experience:

Facebook (82%)
Twitter (66%)
and LinkedIn (65%)

Are the top social networks new social media marketers want to learn about.

Marketers with 3+ years social media experience:

For experienced pros:

Facebook (67%) still tops the list
followed by LinkedIn (58%)
and Instagram (57%)

HOW WILL BUSINESSES & MARKETERS CHANGE FUTURE CONTENT ACTIVITIES

1: Video

The use of video is a key part of most marketers’ plans in 2016, with 73% planning on increasing
their use of videos.

2: Visuals

A significant 71% of marketers plan on increasing their use of visuals in 2016.

3. Blogging

The written word is still important for marketers. Two in three plan on increasing their use of blogging.
B2B marketers are more likely to increase their blogging (71%) than B2C marketers (63%).

Source: Social Media Examiner 2016 Report

FINAL THOUGHTS

Everyone I ask in my coaching, speaking and presentations for businesses answer this one question 100% of the time with this answer.

FASTER

So what is the question?

Here it is: Going forward will things happen faster or slower?

My next question I ask is, what are you doing to be Prepared for it? Most answer that we need to learn new skills.

Remember school is never out for the PRO!

Find a way to motivate yourself, your team or co-worker. Learning is ongoing. Time to lace up the Nike’s and get at it.

If you don’t like change, you’ll like irrelevance even more!

About Blair

Blair Evan Ball is a Social Media Coach and founder of Prepare1, a company that works with businesses, individuals and non-profits. He is a former executive with a Fortune 50 company, and his national division did $1Billion+ in sales annually.

Blair has written three e-books: Facebook for Business Made Easy, Facebook Pages for Business Made Easy, and WordPress Blog Setup Made Easy.

Blair also educates, trains entrepreneurs and business professionals how to amplify their brand, increase revenues, and raise more funds.

The Race is ON! | PREPARE | Get into the Game and WIN!