(Courtesy Marta Kagan)
Instead of asking what is social media marketing, asking why social media marketing is important to you, would provide you with more verifiable information. In a nutshell, social media marketing represents the evolution of the Internet. In the introduction to this section, social media marketing is defined as “the art and science of building relationships throughout every phase of the business cycle.”
The e-commerce technology used on the Internet has dramatically expanded the possibilities for companies to deliver goods and services to their audience. At the same time it has also created a more sophisticated consumer who has the ability to compare your product to others based on reliability, price, features and consumer confidence.
To fully grasp the potential of social marketing, think of it as the infrastructure of Internet activity. Every user has a network of sites that they visit for news, social interaction entertainment, communication and reference.
Visit MySpace.com and you will see any and all of these features on any profile. Where search engines help people find your website, the social networking websites bring your company directly into the Internet user's world.
Similar to the skepticism regarding the viability of e-commerce, the social networks in 2006 were considered to be no more than a fad.Then suddenly, the marketing potential of social networks was exposed when one company pushed the envelope with the launch of a “bulletin” that was a well crafted, soft-sell. The company issued invitations to all of their “friends” on MySpace and drove an avalanche of visitors to their site. The problem with success stories such as these is the behind the scenes tasks that make it all look easy. Make no mistake social marketing requires a significant amount of time and effort and shares many of the same factors as traditional marketing.
The demographics used to create print and video campaigns are essential to social media marketing as well.The key to successful social marketing campaigns, however, is to understand the principle differences in the way these two methods work.
There are over 4,000 social networking sites , defining a campaign that will work for you requires an understanding that the focus is on interests and creating dialogues related to supporting that interest. You must align your product or service to the interest of the social network otherwise it can become an expensive, time-consuming and frustrating venture.
For fun, visit http://www.go2web20.net/ - just don’t waste too much of your time, there is much to do!Embracing this strategy is difficult for companies who use traditional marketing techniques to focus solely on the features of their product or service rather than the results desired by the consumer.
The “hard sell” rarely works in traditional marketing, and using this approach on the Internet is futile.
Using the relationship approach in social marketing also produces faster results than traditional marketing because of its “instant word of mouth advertising” capability.
All it takes is for one person to tell another about a product or service that saved them money, time or effort to spark a flood of visitors to your site.