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4 Pillars of Social Media Marketing – Soc Med Mags Fbk
The critical elements that make up the foundation of any effective social media marketing campaign.
Social networks give you marketing tools to build one-on-one relationships with customers
and a community that draws in future customers. They increase loyalty to your brand and motivate
people to share their great experiences with your products and people.
Social media marketing gives giant multi-nationals all the advantages of the little pushcart
guy who truly knows his customers and shoots the breeze with passers by. It turns any business
into “Cheers” where “everybody knows your name”.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing uses social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube that
we’re all familiar with. It also uses newer social platforms including Quora, which is
a question and answer site, and location sharing sites, such as Foursquare.
However, the backbone of many social media marketing campaigns is a blog. Whether that
blog is hosted on your ecommerce site, is a stand-alone website, or exists on a content
curation site such as Posterous, a blog is important because it gives your social media
campaign a home base. Facebook is a particularly effective platform for a blog.
Let’s look at a little example of how social media spreads a message compared with traditional
media. This assumes two million people see your message
across your various social media touchpoints – YouTube, Facebook, etc. If only 10% of
the people who saw your message share it with their network, you’d reach 100 million people.
And if that 100 million shared the same way, you’d reach 5 billion people. The transmission
Now, compare that with traditional media. Even the Super Bowl, the most watched program
two years running, only reached 111 million viewers in 2011, according to Huffington Post.
And the cost of a single ad airing on the Super Bowl was over $3 million for 30 seconds,
which doesn’t include the production costs for the commercial, which can be another million
or more. Now, you see the value of social media marketing for organizations, especially
when they can’t afford $3 million for a Super Bowl ad.
Social media marketing isn’t free. Even though it doesn’t cost anything for transmission,
you still need to spend time and effort creating value for customers before they’ll consider
sharing your message. That has a cost. Consequently, social media marketing involves more than
setting up a blog or Facebook page. It requires a different approach than traditional
media.
The four critical elements of social media marketing include:
Engagement Integration
Timing Sharing
1) ENGAGEMENT Engagement is a pretty mushy term bandied
about the Web, but I like the definition supplied by Razorfish:
“Engagement in social media is different from traditional advertising
and public relations because it emphasizes consumer-to-consumer interactions that amplify
messages well beyond the potential of traditional word of mouth. Engagement also involves authentic
relationships between the firm and consumers that look more like a real friendship than
a commercial relationship.” It’s engagement that motivates people to
read your message and share it with their own social networks.
2) INTEGRATION I n t e g r a t i o n across channels can
be challenging because we’re not only talking about integrating across social networks,
but integrating with offline media, as well. We call this Integrated M a r k e t i n g
Communication (or IMC) and successful integration creates a strong brand, as well as avoiding
confusion people might experience hearing different messages in different channels.
People are more likely to buy your product based on recommendations from their Facebook
“friends” than from advertising.
3) TIMING In traditional media, we timed our message
to air when more viewers/ listeners were there. So, we advertised on programs or in print
outlets we knew appealed to more folks. We might even have some idea about the folks
because of the nature of the programming.
The same is true in social media marketing. We need to find out when our target market
(the folks most interested in buying our products) are hanging out on social networks like Facebook.
If we post on Facebook during business hours, when it’s convenient for us, we might miss
also need to think about international consumers, who are in much different time zones.
This is where a blog comes in handy, because blogs aren’t as temporary as a status update
or Tweet. And, they’re more readily searchable using Google or Bing.
4) SHARING Sharing is really the Holy Grail of social
media. Not only does sharing help spread your message, but people are more likely to buy
your product based on recommendations from their Facebook “friends” than from advertising.
We think of our friends as being objective, making them more believable. We also think
of our friends as being “like us” so we figure if they like something, we will too.
Engagement encourages sharing. But understanding the mechanics of sharing helps you make sharing
easier.
So, putting hyperlinks on websites, emails, and other forms of electronic communication
helps people find your social media sites. Putting share buttons in these communications
makes it easy for people to share your message in their own social networks.
Social media marketing is but one aspect of a social media marketing campaign that creates
success for your business.
social media, social media marketing, twitter, facebook, google plus, foursquare, quara,
youtube, blogs, relationships, timezones, social media traffic