Social Media Marketing is the process of gaining attention and
web traffic through the social media sites.
During this process, usually
creative content to reach the masses through publicity coming from a
third-party trusted source needs to be created in order for people to
share the content of their interest with others and create a vicious
chain that would make business cover and go beyond the market audience
intended. Every online marketer needs to have a goal, a product, a
service and a cause to promote through the vast and overwhelming World
Wide Web.
If you already have those things defined in your mind, then
congratulations! That could be probably the hardest part of entering
into the social media challenge, and from now on, every single effort
will contribute to reach those goals efficiently and flawlessly until
you put your feet on the Social Media Guru status.
The Social
Media world is wide and more extensive than ever. It is a very strategic
marketing platform that reaches different cultures, ages, religion,
sexes, locations, interests and such, therefore it makes it the perfect
vehicle to reach and target the right audience and achieve total
success.
The whole world won't care about video games, for example, but
only the people that video games is part of their interests. If you
target male audience with ads of high heels on sale, maybe some of them
would go and buy a pair or 2 for their wives, but a pair or 2 is not
exactly the kind of impact you want to have. Therefore, you focus on
certain group ages and certain other factors that cause some services
and products, videos and news to go "viral".
First, we need to know the basic social media sites
Facebook
Holding more than 900 million users, if you're already a Facebook
user this might not be really new to you, but there are lots of features
worth mentioning. You can create a dedicated business page and interact
directly, and free, with your customers uploading free pictures,
products and videos of the service you intend to provide or the product
you are trying to sell.
That way, you can build a data base of people
that will share your posts to their friends and therefore create the
never ending chain. Most of these social media sites have seamlessly
mobile integration so people whether it is a portable PC, a desktop,
tablet or mobile phone get always connected with media in a way that you
should take advantage of.
People log in to Facebook, in any situation,
while commuting, in the park, at home, at school, at work. Then you're
there, promoting your business for it to be displayed in the news feeds,
and you would be there, constantly doing the mind trick game to the
point that people will find something attractive and worth checking
according to their interests. Many big corporations like Starbucks,
Microsoft, Apple, Rockstar, Pepsi etc. are doing the same, and it works
perfectly!
Blogs
Blogs are an easy way for people to communicate in a
semi-professional way when it comes to quality of content. Quality
content is always the key to a good writing and therefore, a good
blogging. There are many blogger CMS (content management service) where
you can get yours up and running for free in less than 5 minutes, some
of these are Blogger, WordPress and probably the most user friendly one,
Tumblr. One of the tricks here is knowing your audience, your market,
who you are targeting and what you want to accomplish with that.
Now
this has to do with some SEO or Search Engine Optimization knowledge,
which is in other words, using the right keywords to rank as high as
possible in a search engine i.e. Google, Bing. It has to be related to
your posts and at the same time, you have to make sure you use a keyword
search tool to check the competition and number of search this given
keyword has.
The lowest the competition and highest number of searches
it gets in a month, the more convenient for you. If you were to
advertise your website holding a service of technical support chat, you
would have to make the keywords very specific so people that are looking
for your service would find you first. It is, for example technical
support for Windows, then you'll have to include specific words, as
going a little more straight to the point. Since the competition would
be really high and Windows technical support is a wide content, you
would focus and go further the specific services your product offers,
therefore, adding additional keywords to go straight to the point would
be the most successful way to do it and you would rank higher in a
search engine and people would find your product easily.
From "Technical
Support Chat" to "Technical Support Chat for Windows 7 and XP" you can
see how we are narrowing the concept of the service you offer making it
more specific, detailed and then competition of support for mobile
operating systems, cellphones, Mac, iPhone, Windows Vista, Windows 8 and
such, are left behind and those sites offering the services you're not
related to won't steal your chances to be found for people that are
merely looking for chat support for Windows 7 and XP. Once understood
the keyword concept you can proceed and create content on a blog that
would be easy to find on a search engine by including the right tags.
Then
we have the Social Media integration again in the blog space. There are
many options to share the content of your blog. Many Content Manager
Services like Tumblr have the social media buttons to share and like or
dislike. You need to look for the options to enable them (in the rare
case they are not enabled by default) so every post of yours would have
the buttons for share on Tweeter, Google+, Facebook etc. and Reblog
within the blogging network you are affiliated to. With great quality
and eye catching content you are encouraging people to share your
stories on other media sites like the ones mentioned above plus you
sharing them and there you have outstanding chances to reach a wider
audience.
Twitter
A fast growing, very popular social media site. With over
340,000,000 tweets a day and around 140,00,000 users worldwide, this
platform is pretty appealing to business and companies as well as for
celebrities, musicians, actors, everybody! A tweet is a message of 140
characters maximum that one can write and post and followers can read
and see any time in their news feeds. Talk about it, interact directly
and start new conversations is one of the things that make this platform
extremely successful. The way they follow Kim Kardashian and read and
talk about everything she tweets in a day, the same way they can do with
advertising and marketing campaigns about brands and products of their
interest.
140,000,000 users to target the right audience might
sound like a difficult task, but seen it from the other side of the
coin, that means more potential customers for a business. Once you get
into the already mentioned vicious chain of any social media site,
things just keep coming along by themselves and first thing you'll
notice is hundreds of hundreds of people engaged in your brand, talking
about it, reviewing it and telling others about events, broadcast and
such.
Linkedin
Possibly a not so popular platform making it boring for some people,
but a very professional and strategic one for the rest. Some people
won't spend long hours chatting or talking to other about silly, trivial
things, instead, this social network goes straight to the point. People
on Facebook and Twitter for example, follow anyone of their interest
for the sake of simply socialize as well as businesses and companies,
but Linkedin is intended to filter and leave the fun behind to focus
deeper in professionalism in social media.
In Linkedin, you can be
part of the people looking for a job/ service, or part of a company
offering a job/ service. You can create either a personal profile with
your professional information about yourself, studies, contact
information, interests, certifications, identifications etc. or, create a
business or company page, same way as you do it on Facebook or Twitter
sufficing the same purpose: share information about your brand, service,
product and keep your audience and followers up to date with the latest
information about your company.
YouTube
YouTube is a very interesting platform. People go watch videos of
any kind or gets redirected by any website that has a backlink to it or
search engines. Once people is there on a given there you have some more
"Related Videos" on a column on the right side of the screen. Clicking
from video to video makes you find things you never thought you would
find, interesting topics, funny videos, how-to kind of videos, publicity
etc. Your chances to be seen are overwhelming and you can also get
people subscribe to your Channel, which is in other terms, your own
YouTube space where you upload your videos. Some people find it way more
interesting and easier to just watch a video rather than reading a
whole article.
You have the resource of visuals. If you were to promote
fashion clothes and that is the purpose of your whole social media
marketing, you can, along with other options, upload a video with people
modeling your clothes, redirect people to your main business site,
recommend people to share your video, to subscribe for future video
updates, to visit your "fashion blog", like your page on Facebook,
follow you on Tweeter, Google+, Linkedin, etc. Close your eyes and try
to visualize the Tree Diagram of the whole Social Media marketing
strategy and how it gets to potentially reach every single corner of the
World Wide Web.
Ambitious, isn't it?
Google+
A fairly new comer on the social media site battle, Google+ offers
integration of a variety of services including Gmail, Google+ Basics,
Google+ Circles that let you share information or "statuses" in a way
Facebook does, but has less popularity so far. You have the "Stream"
feature similar to Facebook's News Feed that would let you see what
others are up to, an option for following very similar as well to
Tweeter.
The service is very appealing to professionals and
business networks because of the exclusivity and integration of
services. You create a Gmail account for example, and unless you disable
it, by default you have access to all these service and a profile ready
to be edited with a picture, contact information, etc. You have access
to the whole Google+ network including already mention Gmail, YouTube,
You+, Circles, Basics and even the well-known search engine saving and
displaying results to the most relevant things to you. It is convenient
to have a spare Google+ account for any Social Media Marketer because
it's potential functionality and because no source is too little or too
much in marketing. Might not have the same impact, a 30 seconds ad on TV
than a small billboard on a bus, but the more you get the message sent
the better results you will accomplish.
Social Media Stats
According
the new 87 studies perform on social media marketing up to 2012, this
approach from companies to customers called B2C or Business to Community
has grown and reached 16% of customer engagement but has potential to
grow to 57% in the next 5 years. More than 30% of the worldwide
population is now online permanently or have some sort of eventual
access to the web. More than 1/5 of consumer's free time is being spent
on the social media sites, reaching an approximate of 250 million tweets
and 800 million Facebook statuses updated every single day. Only in the
United States, more than 80% of online active users spend their on
social media sites or blogs. 60% of people uses 3 or more digital forms
of research product comparison, prices and information about intended
purchases, being 40% of those done via social media sites like Facebook
or simply redirected from one of these sites leading to even direct
interactions with retailers about offers posted. Around 56% Americans
have one to three profiles in a social media site being 55% of them aged
between 45-55 and having at least one profile.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) facts
70%
of the links search users click on are organic. 46% of all searches are
for information about products or services. Half of all local searches
are performed on mobile devices. 66% of new customers use search and
online research to find local businesses. There are 863 million websites
globally that mention "SEO." There are 9.1 million searchs conducted
including the acronym each month, with the top two phrases being "SEO
services" and "SEO company." More than 60,000 Twitter users include
"SEO" in their bios, there have been 13 million blog posts published
that include "SEO" in the title, and Amazon.com carries almost 2,700
different books about SEO 75% of searchers never scroll past the first
page of results. 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine.
B2B companies that maintain active content like blogging and SEO
programs increased their total website traffic, on average, by 25% in
the past year, while those who neglected SEO experienced an average 15%
decline in overall visits. 21% of all time spent online is spent on web
searches. The big three search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo! are among
the five most-visited sites on the Internet. Considering that AOL is #7
and Ask is #10; five of the top 10 most-visited sites on the web are
search engines.
In conclusion, Social Media Marketing is a field
where professionals and amateurs in advertising can come across and put
their own ideas and plans implementing their own techniques. There is no
Social Media Marketer university or college degree, this knowledge that
should be acquired by extensive research, it needs to be constantly
employed and tested in the desired field. It is a revolutionary strategy
that has taken down the old TV advertising tactics shifting it to the
online market.
The percentage of people that prefer to go online on a
computer or capable device versus people that watches TV grows steadily
every single day. Statistics show Social Media Marketing in a lower
impact percentage compared to the legacy ways for advertising, but the
potential it has and room for growth is in no doubt overwhelming and
could be much more improved and interactive than TV has been for the
past decades.
About the Author
Rob Iraheta is an American writer and
technology lover whose passion comes from writing, reviewing and testing
the most cutting edge technology trends. Please visit
http://technologiescuttingedge.wordpress.com for more!
Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/expert/Rob_G_Iraheta/1444433