Thursday, November 26, 2009

Three Essential Components of Online Social Media Marketing


A contemporary marketing venue of social media provides an opportunity to market your business to the masses. Yet very cheap (even free) social media marketing activities gives you a powerful hand to directly approach to the potential customer. It even let you know what the people are talking about your business, your industry and your target market. It’s easy but need crafting of successful marketing campaign to develop a complete business brand.

1. Understand you target audience

Before stepping into real marketing activities, you need to know who your target market is. Understanding needs, wants and demands is imperative in order to shoot the right target. If you don’t understand your target market, you would be wandering in the dark and getting nothing in the end. Analyze their demographic characteristics such as age, gender, and so on to be more specific with your offerings.

2. Add Value for the Potential Customer

After understanding your target market, it’s time to identify their problems and add value for them in your offerings. You can simply jot down their problem by interacting over various social networks such as yahoo answers. Start answering these problems in different sharing websites in the form of videos, articles, presentations and so on. Famous social media channels for this purpose are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and of course your own blog.

3. Connect With Your Audience

Now it’s time to connect with your potential customer on a one to one basis. Engage yourself in conversation with them. Have a personal interaction with them. If you give consideration and like what they share, ultimately they will start to like what you will share for them. And whenever they need a product or service you sell, they will obviously contact you for the business.

Your social media marketing activity is totally up to you, if you do it right you will get overwhelming success in minimum cost and time. And if you do it wrong, you will be wasting all your resources.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Social Media Marketing is Not Fad!!

The biggest debate over the internet is going on whether the social media is a revolution or just a fad. Two schools of thoughts have been developed; one says social media will be gone in few years while other says social media is the greatest economic shift since industrial revolution.

If we only talk about marketing and advertising over social media, in contemporary economic times, all businesses (small and large both) are more concern about cost cutting, so they have been shifting their marketing activities to social media channels. Its low cost. For instance, on Facebook page it has a case study of a shelf storage company, which $1.25 CPC delivered $10.25 cost-per-lead.

Number of users and marketers has been rapidly increasing every day. Compete.com shows recent statistics of twitter that the approximate unique visitors in October 2008 were 3,398,972, now in October 2009 it had 23,042,455; it’s a drastic positive increase of 577.92%. Similarly, Compete shows 188.67% of positive increase with 128,940,004 unique visitors in the month of October 2009 on Facebook.

Naturally, fad starts to decline very early, but social media indicators show positive growth of social media culture. Few more facts will hammer the last nail in the coffin that social media marketing is not fad it’s really a revolution.

1. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.

2. According to socialnomics, over 300,000 businesses have a presence on Facebook and roughly a 1/3 of these are small businesses.

3. $3,000,000 worth of computers sold by Dell on Twitter.

4. It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. Terrestrial TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users. The internet took four years to reach 50 million people...

In less than nine months, Facebook added 100 million users.

If online social media marketing was a fad, it should have been gone already. But it is still there for several years and increasing. Large businesses have been using it for branding to make their logos more recognized and SMEs entrepreneurs have been using social media for marketing and advertising. So the end note of this article is that, by looking at the facts and trends, social media marketing is here to stay and will thrive in the coming years.

Note: facts and figures are collected from authentic resources over internet.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Networking through Social Media, Explained!

? What are social media networks?
? How social networking is so essential?
? On which structure social structure it belongs to which is making it exceptional?
? What are the basic parts of a social media networking site?

Social networking is something which is not a blue colored lava coming out from a tree. Its existence is always been there but its importance in the main stream becomes highly appreciated in past 5 years. But still it’s quite complex for the one to understand who is exceptionally coming out of the blue to social media networking.

Social networks posses a open-ended nature as you leaps in to the social network, and answered a few basic profile questions, its effortless to lay down on couch and marvel what you are suppose to do further.

The simplest way to get familiar with the social networking is to think like you are in a high school. You had a bunch of friends or some people you know around, but you didn’t know the entire crowd studying at your campus.

And when you have to change your school of to some reasons, then you must have an idea that what situation it would be, because you are starting up with no friend beings around you. After attending some lectures, you start to socialize by meeting the people and get associated with those who have the same thoughts and interests that you have.

Indulging into the world of social networking is as same like as you are going to start your new school. At first you don’t have any friends but as you join communities, you get to meet different people, and then select you friends from them by finding similarities between your interests and their interests.

SOCIAL NETWORKING STRUCTURE

Social networking must be pillared on concrete structure that permits the people to both express their own identity and communicate with the people having the same interests. This exclusive structure is included with, profiles, friends, blog posts, widgets, and commonly something unique to the particular social networking website—such as the ability to hi5 someone on Hi5 or poke someone on Facebook.

WHAT IS A PROFILE?

Profile is the promo your personality where you let the world know who you are, it includes the information about yourself like when did you born, where you get educated, which place you live, what are your core interests, what are your favorites and etc.

WHAT ARE FRIENDS?

Friends section of network is included with the trusted members of the site whom you have allowed to post comments to your profile and send private messages in your inbox. There are many options like tagging, live feeding, poking etc which you can avail with your friends. They are basically the heart and soul of the social networking. All the social networks have their own designations of the word friends, like in “LinkedIn” refers them as Connections.

WHAT ARE GROUPS?

Groups are the second most integral part of social network which helps in finding the friends of the same interests and thoughts indulging them into discussions on different topics. A group can be anything from “social media marketing professionals” to “people who like books” to “superman fans”. As “friends” get designated as “connections” so groups are also dual named as networks on facebook.

GROUPS MAKE YOU AWARE OF WITH TWO PRINCIPLES

One: They are the best option to meet the people of your interest as you are in small business then you can join a group where small business holders are sharing their thoughts, Which is quite suitable and make you able to share your experiences and learn from the others.

Two: second purpose they full fill is they make you able to find more information about your topic and make you reach the people who are related to same topic. For example: The Harry Potter group might have discussions about a particular plot line in the books or the location of an upcoming book signing by J. K. Rowling.

DISCUSSIONS

Original purpose of the groups is to build an interaction and relationship between the users in the form of discussions. Most of the social networking portals scaffold discussion black boards where the users chalk out their opinions, pictures, music, video clips etc.

BLOGS

Blogs are the powerful source of the social media networks which make the user enable to create their own blog submissions. While not as feature-rich as blog hosts like Wordpress or Blogger, blogging through a social network is perfect for keeping people informed on what you are up to.

WIDGETS

A popular way of letting your personality shine through is by gracing your social networking profile with web widgets. Many social networks allow a variety of widgets, and you can usually find interesting widgets located on widget galleries.

Social media networking permits the user to maintain light and more in depth contact with connections, links, associates and established friends. This continuous interaction and the growth of relationships will give you both short and long term benefits, in which some of them are unexpected plus surprising. For example, it’s quite usual for a person to endorse your website to another person without any intimation on your part. Through this process your small business can be able to turn into business world GODZILLA.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

The Extreme World of Social Media

We are living in the interesting times of new media; we have been captivated in an immersive, confusing and ultimate transition in our DAY JOB thing. If we don’t try to engage in, our competition will surely do. This whole piece of writing will let you know how new media is strengthened by the term of SOCIAL MEDIA.

The question evolved straight away, what do you mean by social media? Is it some kind of a genie which is fulfilling the wishes of the marketing levels or is it some kind of a magic base ball bat, hitting constantly home runs for the batters?
Yes, social media is something more than happening than those given examples. It’s simply to be defined as the world of conversation, communication and relationship. This is the human race of continuous dialogue.

“If a conversation is taking place online and you’re not there to listen to it or see it, did it actually happen? (Indeed. Conversations are happening and proceeding with or without you)”.

If you are a part of that conversation then you are welcoming others to contribute in-terms of question and answers and also providing them the information about everything they want. Whether it’s attacking or persuasive, accurate or correct or incorrect. Or, even worst when you will be leaving the competition to ride on to become the source for the community.

You fill be facing negative comments and you will be provoking the unsolicited feedback. People will start questioning about your intent. Negativity will not leave you simply because you opted for the participation. Negative commentary, at the very least is authentically a true opportunity to change the perception that you did or didn’t know existed.

Social media is breaking new grounds and setting higher standards all over the globe in the field of online marketing by engaging the users on its turf in order to help them solve problems, find the desired information about the product and making them dialogue which is found to be valuable for both the consumer and the brand.

Social media marketing is running on the principle of more and more engagement of the users following these hefty trends to achieve powerful competitive advantages.

Cultivate a more significant and substantial community

Enhance, augment and develop your brand

Build relationships stronger and fastened

And, create evangelists along the way.