Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing

The Next Marketing Frontier

Social media marketing is a recent addition to organizations’ integrated marketing communications plans. Integrated marketing communications is a principle organizations follow to connect with their targeted markets. Integrated marketing communications coordinates the elements of the promotional mix; advertising, personal selling, public relations, publicity, direct marketing, and sales promotion. Increasingly also viral marketing campaigns are grouped to integrated marketing communications. In the traditional marketing communications model, the content, frequency, timing, and medium of communications by the organization is in collaboration with an external agent, i.e. advertising agencies, marketing research firms, and public relations firms. However, the growth of social media has impacted the way organizations communicate. With the emergence of Web 2.0, the internet provides a set of tools that allow people to build social and business connections, share information and collaborate on projects online.()

Social media marketing programs usually center on efforts to create content that attracts attention and encourages readers to share it with their social networks. A corporate message spreads from user to user and presumably resonates because it is coming from a trusted source, as opposed to the brand or company itself.

Social media has become a platform that is easily accessible to anyone with internet access. Increased communication for organizations fosters brand awareness and better customer service. Additionally, social media serves as a relatively inexpensive platform for organizations to implement marketing campaigns. With emergence of services like '''Twitter''', the barrier to entry in social media is greatly reduced.

(W. Glynn Mangold, David J. Faulds. Social media: The new hybrid element of the promotion mix. Business Horizons, The Journal of the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University)

(W. Glynn Mangold, David J. Faulds. Social media: The new hybrid element of the promotion mix. Business Horizons, The Journal of the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University) (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122884677205091919.html )

Why companies need social media?

The true power of social media comes from the ability to create a community around the company and create digital conversations with its customers and clients. Whether it’s using a blog to showcase company culture, or using Twitter for fast, personal customer service, SocialMediaMarketing.com has the proven track record that will harness that power for you.

Social Media Marketing is unique because online campaigns transcend the web and enter the offline world to generate leads and sales for clients.

The easiest social sites to use for website promotion are social news websites. These are sites that allow users to upload, tag and vote for interesting content and have the power to send tens of thousands of visitors to the most popular sites.

(http://www.socialmediamarketing.com/about/)

Content for Social media

The first rule about submitting content is to make sure it's interesting, unique and non-commercial. Content from a source that social media users know and trust (such as the mainstream media) is always going to have an advantage over content from a blog or ecommerce store.

Many beginners make the mistake of trying to submit their homepage or one of their product pages to social sites - this tactic almost never works. You need come up with content that's going to appeal to the community or communities you are targeting.

Some of the different types of content that may work include:

Breaking news

Guides / tutorials

Interesting stories

Pictures

Videos

Statistics

Try to use enticing titles for your content, never lie and always back up your facts by citing your sources.

When planning for a submission it's important to examine the goals. If traffic is the primary goal then the content that produces might be quite different to the sort of content that would create while trying to attract links from authority websites

Packaging your content

Succeeding on social media sites is maybe 30% about the title of the story, 30% about the presentation and 40% about the content. Quality content with plain boring presentation or lots of adverts stands a much higher chance of failure than average content with remarkable presentation.

Some tips to get started include:

Ensure the content is accessible and looks good in all major browsers and screen sizes

Always include eye catching pictures and images wherever possible

Break the content down into different sections and use headers

Avoid serving intrusive ads that get in the way of the all important content

Social media tools:

1. Trailfire
2. MOO
3. CrazyEgg
4. ShareThis
5. StumbleUpon
6. Twitter
7. Jott
8. Facebook

Some Famous social media blogs:

1. bub.blicio.us (http://bub.blicio.us/)
2. Mashable! (http://mashable.com/)
3. TechCrunch (http://techcrunch.com/)
4. Read/WriteWeb (http://www.readwriteweb.com/)
5. Web Worker Daily (http://gigaom.com/collaboration/)
6. Lifehacker (http://lifehacker.com/)
7. Global Neighbourhoods

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