You have heard the buzz about “Social Media Marketing” and how it will your revolutionize your business — freeing you up from the clutches of Google’s search engine monopoly and flooding your website with throngs of eager consumers.
It’s a nice thought. The reality is that while social media marketing represents a sea change in online communication and is often much trickier to deploy effectively than the pundits will have you believe.
What exactly is social media marketing?
Essentially it is the use of social networks, blogs, wikis, online communities and other online collaborative media for sales, marketing, public relations and customer service. Some examples of social media marketing tools include Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn, Flickr.
Companies are interested in social media marketing because they expect the following benefits:
- An increase in Web site traffic
- Increased lead generation
- Increased sales revenue
- Improved search engine rankings
- Improved brand and product awareness
- An ability to better manage their reputation online
- They are free to use!
How does it work?
The phrase “Social Media Optimization” is used to describe the methods used for promoting and publicizing through social media. There are two categories of social media optimization:
- Adding social media features to your website – such as RSS feeds, social news, sharing buttons, user ratings and polls.
- Promotional activities aside from those on your website – such as blogging, tweeting, making status updates, commenting on blog posts, contributing to a wiki
Sites and services such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg and Youtube
How can we help?
Our experts can create a custom social media marketing campaign for your business. This plan will consist of the following parts:
- Monitoring: We use a variety of tools including tweetscan, Google Alerts and Boardtracker.com to monitor what is being said about you and by whom. We report to you the good, bad and ugly and attempt to detect trends in the conversation
- Joining the Conversation: We will craft productive responses to positive and negative comments alike. Often a someone making a negative comment will be so ingratiated by a personalized response to their complaint that they will often backtrack suggesting that it wasn’t such a big deal after all.
- Starting New Conversations: Through guest blogging, commenting, group page creation among other methods, we will start a conversion to engage customers, industry players, bloggers and max connectors.
Interested in learning more about how social media marketing can benefit your business? Click below for a consultation.