In a Building Presence Voicing Thoughts session at Advaiya, a few days back, I talked about social media marketing (SMM), covering its importance and a few take care areas.
In a series of blog posts, based on the talk I gave, I will provide an overview of some of the key social media marketing concepts, tools, techniques, certain take care areas to consider while building your brand on social media, and some social media success and failure stories.
So, what exactly is social media doing to us, or has already done to our lives? Of course, social media has changed our lives drastically. Â It has given us the power to create multiple (virtual) identities. With each of these identities, you can attach your choices and preferences.
Social Media Marketing
One great aspect of social media marketing is that it has capability to address to all the multiple identities of any individual as needed and, when needed. Social media marketing provides many advantages to both the customers and the marketers:
- Engagement: Across social networks, customers can engage with the messages they can like, share and explore easily.
- Quick Results: The results of social media marketing can be felt very quickly, may be even within minutes or hours of posting the content.
- Dynamic control: Not just the results can be seen quickly on social networks, marketing efforts, messages and modes can also be tweaked quickly and dynamically.
- Better Target Audience: Social networking sites often provide marketers with ability to define the target audience by age, locality, and many other parameters.
Social media marketing involves the use of tools to successfully advertise and engage with audience online. Some of the commonly used techniques are:
- Targeting: Social networks like Facebook and Twitter provide advertisers with some additional information about the consumers, like their likes, dislikes and preferences. This provides the marketers with the capabilities to choose the right target audience to promote and market their offerings.
- Consumer’s online brand related activities (COBRAs) is another method used by advertisers to promote their products across social networks. It includes simple activities like uploading a picture of products they recently purchased and used is an example of a COBRA.
- Electronic word of mouth (eWOM) is equivalent to traditional word-of-mouth, except for that it is done digitally across social networks. Reviews and recommendations are a convenient manner to have a product promoted via consumer-to-consumer interactions.
In the next blog I will talk about some methods/tools related to social media marketing, social analytics, social media measurement, etc, and also few examples of successful and unsuccessful social media marketing campaigns.
In the meantime, I would like to hear about your experiences related to doing effective social media marketing.
