Social Media Marketing
The purpose of social media is to allow mass scale communications among people, while social media marketing takes advantage of this trend in order to sell a product. The trend to move towards social media has moved us very much from a one to many relationship model to more of a many to many model where anybody can communicate with anyone else on the same platform.
Social media marketing is only in its infancy really but already it has impacted the whole world. It isn’t just huge multi-nationals which can use it, but rather everyone all over the world, its free all you need is your PC and an internet connection. In a charitable situation social media can be used quite easily to contact your followers, keep in touch with volunteers, and even find financial support for your work.
The communities sharing the same social media network can create ripples by engaging people in a common goal or topic. However many of us use it because its the only way they can keep in touch with friend and colleagues. Although social media marketing can be a powerful tool, it can be ineffective if it isn’t integrated into an overall marketing strategy. When developing your marketing strategy you should ask yourself these questions .
1) What is the primary goal of the organisation?
Every organisation needs to plan the direction and overall nature of its marketing strategy and should be congruent with the company’s goals and objectives or the corporate mission. Where there is no clear purpose or corporate mission it is unlikely that the company will succeed, not because they won’t reach their targets but rather because they won’t even know if they get there.
2) How does Social Media fit in at the top level?
Consider how social media can be utilised to further the organisation’s goals? Which company goals specifically and which objectives of the social media marketing plan will fulfil the overall company goals? Goals refer to the broader purpose of SM, which is typically ongoing and cannot be measured. Objectives are the measurable and specific outcomes you would like to achieve within the specified period.
3) What is the strategy based upon?
There are three key steps – Listen, Inform, and Participate.
a. Listen to the users, social media is powerful because it facilitates dialogue between many people on a many to many basis. As with all communication skills an essential part of dialogue is paying attention to what the other person is saying. Traditionally market research methods like focus groups, surveys, and interviews are useful ways to gather data, social media can be used as a more active and continuous form of listening. It’s easy to listen to what your customers are saying in the public arena of social media.
b. Next you need to consider how to inform the relevant people of your companies product(s) and / or services. With social media you can now speak from a place of passion and authority to people who are interested in what you have to say.
c. The third aspect of a proactive social media marketing plan is to identify effective ways to participate. An important aspect of dialog is to reciprocation. Look around, if you identify an interesting blog, comment on the content and let others know about it. If you are on twitter and find a useful tweet, make sure to re-tweet use the appropriate syntax referencing the original source.
4) Who are you targeting?
The channels used for your social media marketing approach is influenced by where you consider your target audience is likely to be. Which sites do your customers use to connect with each other or learn about the product and service which you provide? Get involved at a base level and move up in their social network until you gain their confidence then you can push your products.
5) Who is responsible for implementing your Social Media Marketing strategy?
Social media marketing is of course time consuming but can be integrated into your overall marketing strategy nonetheless. Integration is the key it must feel like its a normal activity, a way of life. It is of course essential where a number of individuals are involved to have clearly defined rules around how each person will be involved as well as identifying who will be involved.
6. Always measure achievement
You must measure your success, it doesn’t matter how good you think you are you must measure performance against goals, otherwise how will you know when you get there. Fortunately many social media sites include tools with which will help you to keep an eye on some aspects of the impact you are having at the touch of a button. Twitter provides statistics related to your Tweets on other applications such as Facebook or Myspace. Facebook pages gives you statistics; and the sheer number of followers and fans helps to some degree in telling about the response to your efforts. Some applications like google analytics can be added to Blogs to monitor visitors. It is generally recognised s a good idea to monitor the qualitative data related to your organisation in terms of what people are saying about you. Over longer periods of time you can correlate the increase in social media statistics with increase in sales and traffic to better understand which channel is most productive for your goals. Very often, it is a combination of SM tools that will promote your goals and it may be hard to separate the effects of each.
7. What is the cost of marketing your business in this way?
social media marketing does take time and potentially money, but definitely resources, away from other activities within the business which might be seen as more value adding tasks. You must make sure that the benefits in the long run exceed the business costs prior to adopting a social media marketing strategy. However the key is to think of it as a long term rather than a short term quick hit.
Social marketer, dancer, internet web site marketer and all round fun guy