Social media marketing

In a nutshell, social media marketing is using 3rd party sites to benefit your business. Although the term has become synonymous with sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn it’s really about promoting your business using any sites which allow user interaction. Posting in a forum or commenting on a blog could both be considered types of social media marketing if done with that purpose in mind.

The emergence of Web 2.0 means social media plays an increasingly important role in online marketing and brand management and should be considered an important part of an overall marketing strategy. The extent of its significance can vary greatly depending on the size and nature of your business but trends have been established which reflect the way modern web users interact online.

How does it benefit me?

Social media transforms media monologues into social dialogues by empowering your customers to interact openly with your company. When managed correctly, social media plays two main roles in benefiting your business:

• Increasing brand awareness, credibility and trust leading to an increase in sales.
• Opening up additional communication channels leading to a decrease in support overhead.

Many platforms are suitable for both roles but for many businesses social media marketing will be about setting up a presence on Facebook, connecting with people on Twitter and participating in industry specific forums.

Because social media marketing is new, many companies don’t have a clearly defined strategy when it comes to their social presence. While this isn’t ideal, research shows just being involved is surprisingly important. Determining whether Twitter will be used purely as a customer service channel or for launching promotions for example can be decided later.

Participation in social media raises a company’s profile and, by attracting attention and generating conversation, a company can generate peer to peer recommendations that company recommendations could never compete with. Two thirds of the global online population use social networking or blogging sites so the importance of getting involved is clear.

We can advise you on using social media so you can participate in the conversations happening around your brand. This can include selecting and setting up a Facebook page or group, a Twitter profile, finding fans and followers, submitting your site to social news and bookmarking sites and making sure all this is tied in with your current site and online activities.

What the future holds

Facebook, the webs biggest social site with hundreds of millions of users, has introduced a number of technical ‘plugins’ which make it very easy for web developers to integrate Facebook features into their sites. These plugins allow users to vote on web content and Facebook then uses these votes to make recommendations to users. It’s a parallel to the way search engines evolved using links to determine sites popularity. Other web 2.0 social media sites also have similar functionality and the rapidly growing use of these plugins could signify a major change in the way users determine which sites to visit. Social media is becoming ever more pervasive and exponentially more important.

We understand that for many businesses it can be difficult to put a cost on the benefits of social media marketing but maintain the cost of doing nothing could be significantly greater.