Social networking in business is becoming increasingly popular – the number of available seminars and discussions on this subject alone certainly testifies to that! But does it really stack up in practice or is it just an excuse for not doing any ‘real’ marketing?

Martin Bamford from Informed Choice in Surrey talked to us about the results they have been achieving - and it makes persuasive reading. In fact, Martin can tell that, just a year ago, just 3% of their business came direct from the internet and social networking – today it is an impressive 17%.

Informed choice is a medium-sized financial planning practice in Surrey with ten planners and a strong support team. Martin, one of the planners, holds the marketing responsibility and says that, collectively, they spend up to 20% of their time marketing overall in order to achieve a consistent pipeline.

“We have always been early adopters of new technologies in marketing – we were the first practice to use Podcasting back in 2007 for example, and one of the first to actively use blogging as a communications tool. We’ve usedsocial networking for some years too.

“However, the tipping point came just over a year ago when we completely restructured our web presence and integrated the blog with the website using open source software. This was important as it allows us to update the website from any location – my aim is to update it every day so that our visitors know they can keep coming back and find new, relevant content.

Minimum effort, maximum output

“The critical issue is that we are not duplicating our efforts. One single story is used on the website blog, is broadcast to LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook as well as being used direct with the press. This gives us maximum exposure from one activity.

“I do spend a fair amount of my time supporting our social networks – It can’t be one-way traffic and you need to reply to comments, get involved in conversations and so on – but there is no doubt that we are winning business as a direct result.”

“We did a year-on-year analysis using analytics and discovered that visitor traffic had doubled, and visitors were staying on the site three to four times longer than previously.

“And even when business comes to use via another route – referrals, professional advisers etc – we know that 100% of them check us out on the internet first. As well as our website, our social networking and blogging comes up time and time again throughout Google giving real confidence to prospective clients.”

Want to comment? What are your experiences of social networking and blogging? Has it worked for your business?

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