Social Media Marketing is the BIG thing now. Organizations that have no business in being in it are trying their best to jump in. And organizations that have every right and need to be in it are wondering what the heck to do.
Everybody and the kitchen sink has written articles, treatises, white papers, black papers on what to do with it and how to do it? Heck, with all this advice dispensed freely, why are people not able to understand what social marketing is & how to use the same to forge stronger connections with their customers. The problem is lack of discipline and lack of a tangible process.
So, what is Social Media Marketing?
Before defining this, let’s understand the Web 2.0 phenomenon.
Web 2.0 apart from being the next generation of website design and online customer interaction came into being because of a cultural shift. This shift occurred among Internet users who were bored with being passive surfers (’90s) and transitioned into searchers (’03-’05) and finally into active content creators (‘o6 onwards). From a business’s standpoint, there was a clear shift from push marketing to a combination of push and pull through and it was easy to have two-way conversations with customers. Additionally, all the big search engines Google, Yahoo etc got on board the Web 2.0 bandwagon.
So, with all this background, let’s try to understand what Social media marketing or Social Media Optimization (SMO) is :
Social media marketing is the technique of using social media platforms and online communities for marketing, publication relations and customer service. Common social media marketing tools include Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube.
Why is it so important?
Today more than 150 million Americans research products online. Consumer forums have become even more powerful with raw feedback about products and services available almost instantly. Add to this, the fact that folks today trust word-of-mouth as the best source of information (90% today as oppsed to 65% back in the seventies) makes social media a very powerful medium of communication. Additionally, your pre-sale costs decrease with the use of social media as you can use customers to sell your products, encourage self-service or peer-to-peer inquiries, enable demand generation through word of mouth and engender the creation of customer generated content. You increase brand loyalty by providing the benefit of a personalized experience and also increase sales, increase satisfaction, lower churn rate and are able to get direct customer feedback.
Finally, you can use these customers to conduct market research, obtain product feedback and increase conversion rates.
Another great benefit is adding continuously the sum of direct customer
feedback and experiences to the organization tribal knowledge base. Traditionally, marketing, sales/support and product teams were key sources to the organizational tribal knowledge base but today you have the added benefit of direct customer feedback.
How has the marketing mix changed?
Immensely. See the table alongside for the changes in the marketing mix in today’s web 2.0 world. Interestingly, with the new mix your online brand identity is now shaped by customer chatter and feedback on communities and forums, views and thoughts on blogs or micro-blogs like Twitter, experiences or visuals on Youtube and finally, product reviews on shopping sites or social network groups.
Any benefits of using social media in my marketing mix :
- Increase brand visibility
- Build brand loyalty
- Increase customer engagement
- Gain insight into the customer
- Influence communities
- Reduce service costs
- Increase website traffic
- Increase lead generation
- Get ideas for product improvements or new products
How to do this?
Step 1 : Understand the nature of the social network. On Facebook and mySpace, users log in to connect with their friends and fulfill their(online or offline) social commitments. If you go to Digg or del.ic.io.us, the users there are more functional and are looking for web resources in line with their interests.
Step 2 : Start small. Do just jump into the middle of the lake. Start with one product or if you want to, one product line. Depending on which social network you use, ensure that your brand message is delivered clearly and concisely.
Step 3 : Be comprehensive. When you create a profile on a social network, ensure that you provide as much information as possible. Fill out the complete profile. Use these networks to also promote your SEO efforts so make sure that your top 10 relevant keywords are used when penning down the description.
Step 4 : Seed your initiative. Connect with friends and ask them to join, say your product group or page on Facebook or comment on a blog post. Ditto for a Youtube account that you may have created.
Step 5 : Use linking well. Using the right anchor text, ensure that you have outbound links from these networks to your website. This will aid your SEO efforts to an extent (Google’s spiders have stopped giving relevance to outbound links to your website, Twitter has a no-follow rule in place).
Step 6 : Keep it active. Don’t just create a social network account and then sit back. This is an interactive medium. People want to communicate and get feedback. Engage the users or followers of your groups/accounts. Ask them questions about your products. Address their concerns. Poll them on the competition or to understand their buying or usage behavior.
So, as you can see, once you have a strong network of customers, you have a base from which you can get feedback about everyhting about your products or company. Using digital social media is a strong opportuntiy that should not be ignored or taken lightly, because you could be missing out on a tremendous opportunity to grow your business.
