At this point, most marketers know that smartphones have changed the world. Mobile search is projected to surpass desktop this year, and those numbers only continue to climb. With that knowledge comes the scramble to understand and invest in the channels best suited for mobile. But despite all the evidence that points to the fact that social media has traded in training wheels for a motorcycle, many businesses still hang back on considering social media as a serious channel for reaching consumers.
Even so, the social web in 2015 is an impressive landscape:
- 65 billion people have access to the Internet via smartphones and tablets
- Close to 1.7 billion people have active social media accounts
- Twitter has 284 million active users, and 88% of them are on mobile
- Over 50% of LinkedIn visitors in 2015 will access the site on a mobile device
There’s more, of course, but you get the gist: social media and mobile devices are tightly intertwined, and that should make the “secret” social media conversion that many marketers are overlooking plain as day.
The Secret’s Out: Generating and Tracking Phone Calls from Social Media Platforms Are Worthwhile Activities
Mountain Dew got marketers thinking last year when they launched a click-to-call campaign on Twitter and received 3,500 phone calls, along with 600 retweets and more than 1,300 favorites.
Shocker? It shouldn’t be. 4 in 5 consumers use their smartphones to shop, and studies show that consumers using a smartphone to help make a purchase decision are 51% more likely to make a purchase, as well as 39% more likely to call a business. As we can see from the stats above, consumers spend a lot of time on social media using their smartphones: it stands to reason that if given the ability to connect with a business via phone call, they will. In fact, 61% of consumers believe it’s important for a business to provide a phone number, and 33% would be less likely to use and refer brands that don’t offer a phone number to call. So why wouldn’t you do exactly that?
The customer journey is no longer a linear path, and we can’t always predict how and where consumers will convert. The key is giving them the ability to convert on the platforms and channels that are preferred by them—and in many cases that’s social media. Want to learn more about how to capitalize on your social media presence? Download our white paper, B2B Lead Generation for Social Media: Tips for Generating and Tracking Phone Leads.