How to do social media marketing?
How to do social media marketing?
How to do social media marketing?
Whether you are part of a small, medium, or giant business, or are an individual entrepreneur, your customers are using social media, and there is no reason you should not be, too. It costs almost nothing, it is easy to get started, and it can have an enormous financial impact on your business.
More than 250 million people are active Facebook users. More than 346 million people read blogs, and 184 million people are bloggers themselves. Twitter has more than 14 million registered users, and YouTube claims more than 100 million viewers per month. More consumers are connected than ever before, and every second not engaging in social media is a wasted opportunity. It is a perfect time to engage in social media.
Social media is best defined in the context of the previous industrial media paradigm. Traditional media, such as television, newspapers, radio, and magazines, are one-way, static broadcast technologies. New web technologies have made it easy for anyone to createand, most importantlydistribute their own content. A blog post, tweet, or YouTube video can be produced and viewed by millions virtually free. Now they can make their own interesting content that viewers will flock.
As indicated previously, social media is a great equalizer: big brands can be outsmarted without making huge investments, and small brands can make big names for themselves.
The different categories of social media tools can be leveraged for marketing. Now it is time to start thinking about them as parts of your whole marketing mix.
Your social media strategy should fit with your established identity.
Worst mistakes a new social media marketer will make are to apply the same strategies from the offline broadcast world to the social Web.
Before you launch into a social media conversation, listen. As you do when joining a new forum, lurk in every medium you are going to enter to get a sense of the rules and customs, and of who the influential people are.
Monitoring social media is an ongoing process, and you should use multiple systems to be sure nothing slips through the cracksthe right (or wrong) story can come from anywhere and blow up in your face. You do not want to be caught off guard.
The first tools you should be using allow you to search for your name, business name, and product names; you should then subscribe to the search results via RSS. Set up an account on Google Reader with these feeds, and check the account once or twice a day. We can mash up all the sources in the following list using Yahoo! Pipes, so you can just enter your keyword into the form at and subscribe to one RSS of the results. Do this once for each word you would like to monitor. Your company name, your product names, your name, and key employees' names are recommended.
Technorati Search
Ice Rocket Blog Search
Google News Search
Twitter Search
Google Video Search
Digg Search
BoardReader.com Search
BoardTracker.com Search
SocialMention.com "All" Search
Reddit Search
BackType Blog Comment Search
The sources in the preceding list are a great start but there are websites that do not offer feeds of keyword searches. Visit these sites on a regular basisperhaps once a weekand do a manual search
Delicious
Stumble Upon
Smaller social news and bookmarking sites in your niche
LinkedIn Answers
Google offers a free service called Google Alerts that will send you an email whenever a new result appears in the search listing for certain keywords. Set up alerts on the names you are monitoring, as this will help you catch anything else that gets through the rest of your searches.
Do not forget to monitor your industry, niche, and competitors' keywords. This way, you can learn
what problems your potential audience has with existing products, what features they wish they had, and what they love most about your competitors, so you can stay ahead of the game and are better prepared to ward off future problems. Think of social media as your focus group.
A number of paid options are available if your brand is large and gets many mentions. These tools can be helpful to identify positive and negative buzz, as well as to delegate responding duties within your company.
Here are some of the more popular paid monitoring tools available today
Radian6
Scout Labs
Trackur
Responding
Once you have identified a conversation about you or your brands, you must decide whether to engage and what to do when and if you decide to join in. Speed is vital, so start planning your response as soon as possible.
If a negative comment or conversation is something that your customer support team can handle, by all means, let them take care of it.
If the problem is more of a public relations or brand crisis event, you need to decide whether your public response will draw more attention to the problem than it would have gotten naturally. Err on the side of responding, but at least ask yourself whether your response will draw unnecessary attention to the conversation.
Remain calm when a potential social media crisis begins to break out; follow the same protocol. Becoming angry or defensive will not help your causeit will only make matters worse. Do what you can to fix the problem that led to the gripe, and detail what you are going to do to make sure it does not happen again.
Responses to negative feedback should be communicated in the same medium in which the feedback was communicated; once you have started to monitor what is being said about you and your brand, you should get to know your audience. You want to know who they are, where they hang out online, and how they use the Web.
You are probably in your target market personally, and if not, you likely know a few people who are. Start with them (or yourself); ask them that their favorite sites are and what blogs they read. Build an initial list of these sites as starting points. Say you want to reach an older, more affluent female audience. Access Quantcast and look the data on sites like Kirtsy, Sugarloving, BlogHer, and Stumble-Upon. The actual work of social media marketing can be divided into two types, ongoing strategy, and campaigns.
Your ongoing strategy is the stuff you are doing on a regular basis, blogging, tweeting, contributing to forums, and so on. This is what you should be doing before your monitoring strategy finds an erupting crisis. Your ongoing work builds your brand and reputation.
When you have built a foundation of social media engagement with an established blog, Twitter account, and reputation on various social networks and sites, you can start launching campaigns. These should fit within your ongoing strategy and have specific goals and finite timelines. Viral videos, contests, and product launches should all be supported with dedicated campaigns. Seasonal and timely events are great things on which to base campaigns. Campaigns are the kinds of social media efforts that result in large but temporary spikes in traffic. One of the central tenets of Web 2.0 is the idea that web applications should be able to share data and play nicely together.
A call to action (CTA) is an invitation you make to your website visitors to engage in some type of action that benefits your business aimsand hopefully theirs, too. CTAs usually have one of two goals: stickiness and conversion. Sticky CTAs turn ephemeral waves of traffic into return visitors, whereas conversion-based CTAs lead a visitor into your sales funnel. Most communities will accept the former, and the latter should be approached more delicately to avoid the appearance of hucksterism. Conversion-based CTAs are designed to turn a visitor into a customer. There are two types of conversion-based CTAs, depending on your business model: leads and purchases.
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