Introduction to Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing is the process of gaining attention through social media and creating traffic. Social Media Marketing programs concentrate on creating content that attracts attention and influences readers to share it across their social networks. Social media marketing has now become an integral part of companies marketing strategies. Visitors who share it on their social networking platforms are a trusted platform meaning they know it is of a potential interest to them.

Why is Social Media important to businesses?

– Popular social media platforms are accessible to anyone.
– It is inexpensive for companies to implement campaigns.
– Social media campaigns if marketed correctly can potentially go worldwide, with 50% of Twitter users now outside of the USA.
– Businesses can obtain direct feedback from customers and markets, this allows them to build a relationship of trust and credibility with their target audience.
– Once a relationship has been built with the target audience on social media, this allows the business to conduct detailed market research.

Social Media Marketing Strategies

There are 4 key steps to ensure have been correctly followed before the campaign is launched.

Step 1-

Preliminary Online Market Research…….

• What is the target audience?
• What contents/trends are most appealing to the target audience?
• What’s the percentage of your target audience involved in social networking?
• Can any of the platforms the business currently utilises or content the business currently distributes be integrated into the social media marketing strategy?

Step 2-

Ask your current clients/customers about their social media habits. Send a brief email with a link to a short survey created by the company. Analyse the feedback to determine social media usage, social media platforms, and opinions about social media.

Step 3-

Now you know from step 2 which social media platform best reaches the target audience, you can determine applications to use in order to survey and analyse trends, performance and usage of the social media platform.

Step 4-

Add more complex content such as videos, blogs or any other features available.

Social Media Tools that Businesses can use

• Audio Sharing- Uploading audio files to a dedicated platform to share with a larger audience and allow feedback i.e. Padomatic, iTunes.

• Microblagging- Short Messages i.e. Twitter.

• Blogging- Writing an Online journal with posts published in reverse chronological order i.e. WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Posterous.

• Photo Sharing- Uploading photo files to a dedicated platform to share them with larger audience and allow feedback. Flickr, Fotiki, Instagram.

• Video Sharing- Uploading video files and allowing feedback i.e. YouTube, Vimeo, Hulu.com

• Social Networking- Building and maintaining relationships based on common interests, relationships and experience i.e. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIN.