Introduction to Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing (SMM) encompasses both advertising on social media sites and interacting with the communities on social media sites. Worldwide advertising spent on social media networks such as MySpace and Facebook is expected to grow from $1.2 billion in 2007 to $4.1 billion in 2011 (see graph below). Interacting with a social media community entails creating a brand or company profile and communicating with users one on one.
Interaction: Engaging the social media communities
Interacting with and contributing to social media communities offers many opportunities to companies of all sizes. Some opportunities include:
- Creating profiles and using social media sites are free. The only cost is the time spent leveraging the power of these vast social networks.
- Increasing your funnel: Grow your brand and company through social media exposure. Many social media sites allow users to search for other users based on factors such as: location, interests, hobbies, jobs, etc.
- Customer feedback: Social media users who are already your customers or have experience with your brand/product/service are more likely to engage with you. Social media sites enable people to communicate with ease. As a result, these users can easily communicate with you and express their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with your brand/product/service.
- Positive reviews add value and increase positive perceptions of your brand/product/service. But there are also positive opportunities in negative reviews and opinions…
- Negative reviews can help highlight problems with certain staff, products, services, locations, etc. These negative reviews can give you insight on how to improve existing products and services. They also give you the opportunity to publicize your company’s excellent customer service. You can address the user who has the negative opinion of your brand/product/service and ask how to remedy the situation. Doing this and actually solving his or her problem on a public platform is a great way to demonstrate that your company puts its customers first and wants to make sure that they are satisfied.
- Social media and network sites are great tools for online brand management.
Estimated Growth of Advertising Spending on Social Networks, 2006-2011
Examples of Social Media and Social Networking Sites:
- MySpace (Social network)
- Facebook (Social network)
- LinkedIn (Social network for business professionals)
- Digg (Social news bookmarking)
- StumbleUpon (Social bookmarking)
- Del.icio.us (Social bookmarking)
- Mixx (Social bookmarking)
- Hugg (Social bookmarking – Environment/Green)
- Meme or Lame (Social bookmarking – Gadgets)
- Qoolsqool (Social bookmarking – Educational resources)
- Sk*rt (Social bookmarking – Lifestyle)
- Small Business Brief (Social bookmarking – Business)