A Guide to Social Media Marketing
At the heart of successful businesses often lies effective marketing. This is especially true in today’s scenario with the ever increasing popularity of Social Media Marketing (SMM). No matter how good your product or services are, unless you market it right, you may not attract enough eyeballs. Keeping that in mind, friends, I thought it is a great idea to discuss Social Media Marketing here. Let’s start! Firstly, what is SMM? It is a form of internet marketing (integrated communications plans) which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through participating in various social media networks. It involves relatively inexpensive, low cost promotional methods and is available easily to anyone with an internet connection. This form of marketing is driven by word-of-mouth, and is not an outcome of paid media. The concept basically involves promoting businesses or websites through social media channels. The emergence of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube have made it quite easy for companies to foray into social media marketing
Following are the top goals/activities Social Media Marketing helps you achieve:
- Brings visibility and awareness, page views for your brand
- Generates website traffic
- Reaches broader customers, leading to business development
- Helps Sales tracking, conversions
- Gains huge amount of attention from customers
- Improves customer service
- Generates revenues through selling your content, or merely publishing it for ad revenue
Getting started with your Social Media Campaign
These are the first things you can consider to kick start your social media campaign:
Facebook Fan Page: Create your company’s Facebook Fan Page for business and get people to ‘like’ and join it. Upon doing that they will automatically start receiving updates, latest information, offers and freebees. Here you can promote your brand exclusively and perhaps even use it as an e-commerce platform. Interestingly, there are a number of easy to create applications you can build on your fan page. Popular companies like Kellogs, Ford and Coca Cola have effectively used Facebook for their campaigns.
Twitter: Twitter is a great way to venture into social media marketing. Just ensure you are constantly giving out interesting information to your audiences. With increasing number of Twitter users each day, it’s best that you understand how Twitter works, and what good it can do for your brand. Big companies like Dell have wonderfully used Twitter to their advantage.
LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a professional networking platform. It is excellent place to find the job you have been looking for and meet professionals in of our interest. LinkedIn conducts alumni meets too! What’s also cool is that you can link your Twitter account to LinkedIn account as well. However, it is important to have a neat and clean look to your profile, lending it a business like professional touch.
Blog: Blog is a great way to reach out to your customers. Whether you portray your company’s sensitive side or keep it a blog with quality information and updates, is your choice. People love to read about the industry they belong and keep coming back to their favorite blogs often.
Mobile Social Networks: Mobile Social Networking is a great way to talk about your business. Though mobile social networking may have not picked up to a great extent in India, looking at the growing number of mobile internet users this is bound to pick up eventually. Foursquare seems like a promising platform in this space.
The number of internet users is increasing in India, with each user having a mind and voice of his own; I believe that SMM soon will make a big splash in the world’s largest democracy – India!
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