Mention online marketing today and what will hit the minds of many people is social media marketing. In fact if you happen to attend any forum where the subject of marketing comes up and you fail to mention the numerous advantages of social media marketing, you risk getting frowned at. Marketers all over the world have, in a great number, turned to this new method of marketing. But what exactly has given marketing over social media the popularity it has recently earned?
This technique utilizes social sites such as Facebook and Twitter to reach its target audience. Statistics have it that every day over five hundred million people visit such websites and spend a considerably good amount of time on them. Now that is a large number, one that would be difficult to reach through any other media. This is great number of potential customers is what has made markets go crazy over marketing using social media.
With new companies springing up every day, businesses are faced with stiff competition that is increasingly becoming tougher. The use of social media is giving businesses a powerful tool to effectively compete in such a competitive environment. The advantage is that a business that is using social media is able to track what people are saying not about it but also about its competitors. As an added bonus, social media links can help your SEO efforts as well.
Think of it this way; you are in a race and you get this tool that enables you to locate where you are on the track, know how many competitors are ahead of you, how many fall behind you and even what each is doing or planning. You get charged up and can easily come up with strategies to help you reach the finishing line ahead of everyone.
It does not really matter the type of business you run or its size. Social media gives every business an equal opportunity and it is up to the company’s management to come up with the right strategies. The important thing is to first establish the objectives of your marketing. With the objectives in mind, you can then move on to draw up a strategy on how to use social media to achieve the objectives. This is something that small and large businesses can do alike.
You can now see how great social media marketing can be and you probably are thinking such a powerful tool must be very involving to set up. The truth is; it is not. Social media marketing can be started by simply having a Facebook, Blog, or Twitter account and start by engaging people in interesting and informative short sessions. It is that simple as well as cheap. Like many other marketing strategies, you can then develop it to reach a wider audience and to achieve several other business objectives.
#1 written by Michael Dempsey January 6th, 2011 at 01:22
Another very interesting article Garry. I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit about this “you get this tool that enables you to locate where you are on the track, know how many competitors are ahead of you, how many fall behind you and even what each is doing or planning.” Are you suggesting that you can use social media metrics to gauge yourself compared to the competition, or do you mean that you can just kind of tell by who is popular at the time?
#2 written by admin January 10th, 2011 at 16:31
Hey Michael! Yeah, it’s more of an estimate of popularity and competitor activity.