Social media marketing is a process ; it works from a personal perspective. The emphasis here is on the person first and their business interests second. This marketing approach shifts from an impersonal advertisement to a personal profile: Your commercial venture now has a human face. By becoming a member of a social network, you are identifying with the common perspective of the group.
Similar to joining any social group, there is a period of time where you interact with others, discuss issues and contribute to the network conversations. You share information about yourself, what you do professionally as well as your leisure time interests.
As your circle of friends grows, you begin to tailor your dialogue with each of them to address their area of interest. When coupled with efficiency and focus, social media marketing creates the best branding, link building and search engine marketing strategy.
The wave of interactive applications that has become a part of the Internet today opened the door for Internet users to contribute and control content on company websites; blog comments and customer forums are just two examples.
The advent of websites dedicated to user contributed content takes this desire of the Internet user to express themselves to the next level.However social media is about generating a conversation. For example, inviting comments on a story. This act doesn’t create a community. Social media is used in many cases to organize a network or community around a common interest, but community and social media are two separate entities.
The simplest way businesses can leverage social media to discover how their customers respond to specific initiatives or content. An enterprise can also benefit greatly by creating a community that showcase their capabilities and cater to their customer base and their employees. Using rich media applications to engage your audience can result in lower overhead, increase ROI and higher retention levels. The five outstanding features of community are:
· Consistency: There is a core membership that interacts over an extended period of time.· Commonality: Members become part of a community because of their interest in a specific concept or goal.
· Conversation: Within a community there are a variety of ongoing activities and discussions that are initiated by different members.
· Communication: The members of a community interact with each other independently about issues that may not be the main topic of discussion in the community as a whole.
· Commitment: Over time leaders of the community leaders come forward from their activities that support their concerns.
A social media marketing campaign involve all of these aspects; it is a progressive strategy that requires time to fully mature and produce results. Because this is a more personalized form of marketing, it is vital to select the networks for your campaign with an eye to genuine interest due to the time required to interact with other members.
Simply put, people are social by nature and social media marketing uses the Internet’s modern communication to create a wide range of social interactions that cover every imaginable subject. No matter what category you can think of, there is a social media website dedicated to it. With approximately 4,000 social networks online, people are connecting to a greater assortment of social media options like Twitter.com.
In addition to user contributed content as an information distribution source, we have now arrived at a unique plateau in the development of the social networks: they are beginning to transform the way news and events take place. In 2008 there was an earthquake in the Los Angeles area, there were hundreds of detailed reports on what, when, where and how events were taking place on Twitter.com almost 15 minutes before any official news outlet was able to report the story. This information could be given to emergency crews to provide timely assistance during a disaster.
What’s really exciting is that now social media marketing is moving beyond the computer. Cell phone technology has evolved to the level where you can deliver online messages to your consumer’s phones and other portable media devices at anytime. Social media is revolutionizing marketing and the impact maybe even greater than the industrial revolution. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution) When you apply this power to the area of business, it creates multiple avenues for your company to connect through the medium they prefer. For business applications it’s important to really understand how the power of social media can influence the bottom line of company profitability. This marketing perspective is all about relationships, communicating and meeting the needs of your customers.
What social media marketing provides to businesses is an immediate platform for enriching every facet of a business relationship cycle; from generating leads to facilitating the sale to providing customer care after the sale.
Research has shown that those in business today that learn how to effectively harness the power of social media will have an advantage over their competition to such an extent that could lead to doubling or tripling of their profits in as few as 12 months.
The visitor traffic to several of these social networks now rivals that of Google, the major search engine. Because these networks are focused on the person, they have the potential to develop your business in new areas as well.
At the core of social media marketing is a high-level web-based content management system. There are some core components to creating an authority presence through social media, such as:
· blogs,
· news feeds,
· forum creation,
· article marketing,
· automated and manual bookmarking, · online infomercials and video