subject: It Came From Facebook! The Social Media Marketing Challenge That Can't Be Ignored [print this page] Social media marketing is a huge market right now. It has really been booming and continues to grow. The question is can marketers integrate this method and capitalize on it. Nowadays the majority of people on the internet spend a lot of their time on social networks and blogging sites.
The basis behind social media is to provide the customers and visitors with entertaining content so that they can continue to support and visit your website. You want to develop an approach to where you're advertising but not directly advertising, create content that is entertaining but also informative. That way you can stir up conversations within the group while enlightening them in a professional manner.
In recent studies done by Global Faces and Networked Places, they have found that about two thirds of the internet population visit social networking and blogging sites. About ten percent of internet time is devoted to websites like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, etc. This market in the last year has grown and even doubled in the amount of the rates as compared to that of emails. The internet is continuing to grow and people can see the shift to an internet world. Facebook is one of those social networking sites that have flourished and grown to be one of the most popular websites on the internet. The site itself has grown to a shocking 566%. It has been ranked the ninth most popular website in the World Wide Web. Facebook has grown to be so big that it now controls a third of the population on the internet globally. That means that around the world there is one out of every three people who use Facebook.
Traditional advertising is definitely not the way to go on social networking sites. You have to establish a creative way to implement the ads to them but not in a discomforting way. Don't throw ads in there to where the visitors see it as a form on interruption or disturbance. You have to make sure that they're relevant ads and that can relate to the topics on the site.
Just to show how big it has become, social networks like Facebook can even be accessed through cell phones, particularly on smart phones. A very popular smart phone that has grown over the last couple of years is the famous BlackBerry. This savvy smart phone can access all the social networking sites such as the Facebook and Twitter all through the phone. Just to throw a number out there, the number of people accessing these networks through their cell phones has grown by 156 percent in the U.S. just in the last year.
According to The Social Technographics of Business Buyers, seventy seven percent of business decision makers use social media in their services. Only about half of them feel that it plays a role in the consumer's buying process. This is where they're wrong; you have to know the audience that you are directing to. First you have to know the type buyers that you are aiming towards so that you can better put into action as to how you should go about marketing to those people. You want to make sure that what you're marketing will have an immediate effect to the viewers.
B2B marketers should apply the notion of answering frequently asked questions on websites like Yahoo Answers and Answers.com. Apply the knowledge and expertise of your company into the questions so that you can better inform the people. The ones who offer the best answers increase influence into the consumer's buying decisions.
