The Benefits of Social Media Marketing
Up until recently it could have been considered a wise strategy to remain on the social media sidelines. Fads in communications technology come and go – who remembers videophones? Social networks could well have turned out to be a flash in the pan. It didn’t. The use of social media continues to grow at a staggering pace – Facebook has acquired over 800 million active users, Twitter over 200 million. Even if this growth plateaus, the social media user-base will remain huge and massively influential.
The time to jump into social media marketing was yesterday – but don’t panic; it’s never too late. Familiarising yourself with the basic concepts of social media is the beginning of a process which could see you harnessing the awesome power of this new phenomenon.
Social Media: A Potted History
The term has such a loose definition that the history of social media is the history of digital communication itself. As long as there have been telephones and modems (even before the invention of the world wide web) people have been using them to share information with contacts all over the world. Until the internet was made publicly available in 1991 though, this was an underground pursuit limited to a tiny fraction of the population.
Then the lid came off. In rapid succession we saw the introduction of Internet Relay Chat which gave way to Instant Messaging, allowing users to maintain a continuous, ongoing dialogue and share content with their contacts in real-time. Peer-to-peer websites like Napster which allowed the sharing of large files like music and the first genuine ‘social networking’ sites like SixDegrees started appearing around 1997-1999.
This was Web 2.0 and the beginning of a massive surge in social applications on the internet. Friendster and MySpace continued the social network trend until Zuckerberg, Saverin, Moskovitz and Hughes swept into the market place with Facebook which rapidly became the largest of all. Meanwhile blogging was becoming huge, allowing millions of users to publish their own content online, and microblogging sites like Twitter providing a rolling medium through which users could carry on unbroken conversations – transplanting instant messenger software.
Smartphones took all this technology to the streets. All of a sudden, people were becoming plugged in to the online social sphere 24-7, wherever they were.
All the while, the competition between Google, YouTube, Microsoft, Apple and others have been making the world wide web a smarter, faster, easier place to create and share content, communicate and collaborate, adding to the power and vibrancy of the social media phenomenon.
It’s no fad. It’s not going away. In fact, this is only the beginning.
Social Media Marketing: Harnessing the Power of Web 2.0
All the talk so far has been of ‘users’ and ‘people’ so where do companies and organisations come into this? How can businesses and brands utilise social media? What properties and features of social media interaction can be harnessed by such entities to their advantage?
First of all we need to let you in on the big secret of social media marketing. Ready? Okay, here it is: there is no secret. All forms of marketing are, in essence, communication. What happens between users, contacts and connections on social networks and other social media tools is, in essence, communication. Ergo, social media marketing is simply a case of jumping in and becoming a user.
Opening up a line of communication with your target audience is a simple case of signing up to the tools which they use and starting to talk. If you can come up with good, interesting content that other users will want to share, your messages will propagate throughout the social sphere at lightning speed, boosting awareness of your brand and prompting people to explore it further.
Sound like a lot of work? Well, yes it is. So why bother? What advantages does social media marketing have over traditional forms? What does social media presence get you that prime advertising space doesn’t? Glad you asked:
- Trust – When users share your content with their contacts online, those recipients see the content as coming from a trusted third-party source i.e. someone in their network. They are therefore less likely to dismiss it as a simple marketing message.
- Speed – If one of your messages resonates with users and starts to pick up some steam, you’ll know almost instantly. All social media platforms have search facilities or third party tools available that can get you data on who’s mentioning you and how often.
- Authority – The ultimate aim is to become a trusted source of information and content within your area of expertise. Building a community of contacts who trust and respect you as a source will influence other users online who are connected to this community – from there, the momentum can only grow.
- Cost – If you can combine inventiveness, creativity and honesty, coming up with content that users will want to share can cost you practically nothing. Once the message is out there, it costs you nothing when others pass it on. Compared to some other forms of marketing, that’s pretty cheap.
- Responsiveness – Social media isn’t a one way street. You can enter into a dialogue with your network, responding to their enquiries, recommendations, suggestions etc. This makes social media not only a marketing tool but a customer service and image management tool as well. Why wait for a PR company to get into gear over a news story or reputation damage when you communicate with your audience directly?
- Stickiness – When users propagate links back to your content or website, they’ll stay out there adding to your search profile and providing routes through which other users might stumble upon you.
So as well as putting your brand message before a potential audience of hundreds of millions, you also get the added benefits listed above. There is no doubt that getting social can be a massive boost your overall marketing strategy. But beware: all the above benefits have flip sides. Anything you do in the social realm can have a positive or negative (or no) effect. If you’re not comfortable with a constantly ongoing dialogue with your audience, if your interactions seem forced or token or if you just won’t shut up, users will see through your attempts to cajole them and a negative perception of your brand is what will propagate through cyberspace. Due to the permanence of the content that gets put out there, that can take a while to put right.
Getting the balance right between only saying something when you have something to say and talking often enough to build social media momentum is tough. If you’re not confident it might be a good idea to hire in some expert consultants to help you build a strategy.
In summary, there are no obstacles to getting your brand social. As long as you manage your interactions carefully – and keep in mind that above all users value honest and genuine interactions – there are no limits to how far your social media influence can spread. So jump on in; the water’s lovely.
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