Sri Lanka, being a country having 1,776,220 Internet Users by June 2010 out of the 20 Million population by that time has gained a keen reputation as valuable internet users since number of messy sites were blocked by the government. According to the statistics 838,380 amount of people use Facebook by end of March 2011. This supposed to be increased rapidly since it has shown a 3.9% of penetration during that quarter.
Being an internet user is a great privilege for most of the people since they really hard to find internet. I was also a part of that sample since I got access to internet by 2009. What I did as soon as I became an internet user was just create an email account and a Facebook account. Facebook was just a website for chatting with people who do I know and do not. Actually, that was the reason for me to pick Facebook over Hi5. Today, Facebook is reaching to be another Google. Having more than 50% of world population, it reaches a new era of connecting people.
How many Sri Lankan companies have Facebook Fan Pages? How many Sri Lankan companies have Twitter accounts? How often do the companies use available Social Media? When compared to Year 2008 and 2009, the population increase is around 2 lacks while the internet user population increase is around 4 lacks.
Sri Lankan companies do use all the available paid marketing mechanisms up to maximum extent. They use Television, radio, New Papers and sometimes street walls as well. But, have they thought about the limitations? This is a highlighted reason for the starter companies to fall down accidentally. What I do prefer for a starter company is to create their own Facebook Fan Page and a Twitter Account to get the basic crowd gather with you. These people are the ones who are pretty much interested on changes.
Since it is said that bringing a new consumer to a product is 10 times harder than retaining the existing consumer, keeping those consumers is important. Then you got to build up a platform to them to promote your product verbally. One of the recently viewed strategy was that Coca Cola’s Happiness Ambassador campaign. Although Coca Cola is not a starter company, there are lot of lessons to learn from them. Have we seen such a concept coming forward from Sri Lankan Starters? What happened to My Cola? Everyone has forgotten there was such a company even.
Twitter is a great platform to spread your news in a second. Although reach is not that much compared to Facebook, the support given for marketing the products is higher. The recently introduced Orkut, a Social Networking platform from Google will also be a great tool in near future. Even advertising in social media is also pretty much less expensive when compared to other media. The advertisements will appear on left corner of the Facebook profile and within a view, the user get a lot more things in to his mind. That is what effective. If you are a starter, just use this basic steps initially before moving to paid marketing or even before the product launch, you will be benefited as you never expected before. Thereafter, it is all about keeping the clients by providing what they like.
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