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by Mary Henderson

on Mar 10

Take social media 101 seriously!

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Almost every marketer I meet asks me how does social media marketing work? So I am dedicating this blog to try and explain social networking from a marketers standpoint.

When a user of a social media website (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) discovers your story/content and likes it, they have the option to share it with their friends. This can cause the story to 'go viral' and be shared with even more people. This can deliver thousands of visitors, launch a website or new product and bring significant inbound traffic. This traffic will directly bring your site potential unique visits and indirectly help with search optimisation.

When using social media marketing the quality of your content is crucial: the better it is the more likely it will be shared around. It is therefore critical to have a strategy in place for social media marketing because it does require someone on the client side to write, research and push the content. The bigger your network (customer base) in these social networking sites, the better your results because they will give it that initial push, increasing the chance of the story going viral amongst their network.

Social media content and marketing should be more about the conversation than “selling” at the very start. As you commit to providing content and information, the selling eventually comes but this takes time because you need to build trust and your customer needs to trust in the information you provide before they share it with their friends.

Social networking sites are most popular among 18-34 year olds. They tend to spend 4.3 times on social media than with TV, radio, newspapers, magazines and books combined. This is happening because social media allows users to talk to each other and choose for themselves what they see and read. Social media is a global conversation and not a one on one or one to many communication.

This conversational aspect of social media is crucial to understanding social media marketing because you can’t fake a conversation and you can’t automate it. As a marketer you need to accept this. I often get told by clients –“I don’t want negative commentary… it could dilute the brand...” My response to this is to allow for all commentary. How else can you improve on your products and services? Your customer is giving you the truth and giving you the opportunity to fix problems or deliver new products and services that you never considered. Negative and positive commentary are neither good nor bad, it is information gathering from your core customer.

The next question I get is how do I create and attract a network of customers to my social networking site? Well that’s the strategic part and yes it does require a well thought through strategy which should be a part of your marketing planning. There are so many angles to tackle social networking marketing because there are so many considerations and goals. If social networking marketing is well planned the results can be outstanding.

Stay tuned for my next blog. I will expand on the social networking marketing dialogue.

6 Comments

John
  • Wrote on 11 Mar, at 03:02PM
I saw an awesome example of a story going viral on facebook recently - there were over 125 comments in the first hour and the hits to the related blog went crazy for the month following. Basically, they created a hype without letting the cat out of the bag on what it was all about with a cash incentive. The next three days everyone kept commenting and coming back to see what they had to do for the prize - it turned out to be a blogging contest with a handsome sum at the end of the month but because there was enough hype created prior to the competition starting, all of the facebook followers jumped on - I think they got over 1000 blog comments on their site each week.
Akshay Tatuskar
  • Wrote on 11 Mar, at 08:04PM
Nice article. This is the beginning of the end of search engines. People are using more of social networking sites(facebook,twitter) for anything they need instead of going to search engines. Social Media Marketing is going to lead the internet marketing world.


Akshay Tatuskar
http://twitter.com/akshaytatuskar
Clive Hawkins
  • Wrote on 12 Mar, at 12:56PM
Hi Mary, this is a good intro and I'll look forward to your further posts on this subject. What many companies want to see, however, are realistic examples of how SMM has worked, or could work for them, as this is the best way of demonstrating the potential power of this media.

Akshay, I'm not convinced about the argument of social media replacing search. They both have different roles and although people will use recommendations for some things, your widest circle of friends will never be able to compete with the depth of data provided by Google and other search tools. Sure, there is likely to be a shift, but search engines in some form will continue to provide a necessary function.
Pandora console
  • Wrote on 15 Mar, at 03:07PM
Social network will be lost as the companies are creating there own network, the strength of the social network lies in the fact that companies do not own them and in those network are on a equal footing with their clients.
watson
  • Wrote on 24 Apr, at 05:03PM
Great article and I agree with you that young generation spend a lot of time on social networking sites as now people are quiet interested in sharing their views with other people and there you can get your own group who are interested on the same topic that you are interested in...
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