Social Media Marketing

Social media describes the online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. Social media can take many different forms including text, images, audio, and video.

Social media is very popular and is one of the fastest growing media. Because of its popularity, most firms are tempted to have a social media presence. However, social media may not be useful for every company. Before deciding whether to embark on a social media strategy, there are a number of questions that firms need to consider.

• Who is your target audience?

• Does your audience use social media?

• Is your competition on social media? If they are, how effective have their media efforts been?

• Do you have the resources to develop a social media strategy? This includes time, budget, personnel, skill.

• Do you have the patience to build a long term relationship with users of social media sites? Remember that social media is about building long term relationships, and not just short term customer wins.

• Are you willing to take a risk and let social media users shape your message? Social media is driven by user-generated content. So you lose control of your message once you go online.

• Can you handle the fact that consumers will write negative comments about your business/brand?

Marketers interested in participating min social media face a number of challenges such as:

• Long term rewards: social media is not a very effective tool for marketers looking to exclusively develop short term revenue generation opportunities. Most of the marketing opportunities involve long term interaction and relationship building. Marketers looking to use social media for short term marketing processes could be disappointed.

• Measuring your ROI: Since a lot of the value from social media is not immediately quantifiable, marketers may have a hard time measuring their returns on investment (ROI) and justifying their marketing budgets.

• Social Media marketing can be time consuming since it involves long time interactions

• Social media is relatively new so its advertising and marketing infrastructure has not been well developed. Firms are now trying to develop marketing models and there is no guarantee that any of them will be effective. So there is really no structured approach that marketers can use to successfully market their products.

• Social media marketers do not have as much control over their message as they normally have on other media. Social media users have a lot of power. They have access to millions of other social media users and can make any comments (positive or negative) about any company or brand.

• Users of social media see advertising as an intrusion and as a result tend to resist advertising. As a result, all of these social media marketers are facing a dilemma.

Non-Paid/Organic Social Media Marketing Activities

These refer to activities that companies can be involved in on social media but do not have to pay for. Listed below are 10 popular non-paid activities:

1. Create a business page/profile

2. Showcase your company/products/brand

3. Promote and engage your current customers

4. Search for new followers

5. Run contests and promotions

6. Use hashtags

7. Use local marketing strategies

8. Improve your search engine ranking

9. Integrate your media activities (social and non-social media)

10. Continuously improve your strategies (use analytics)