Social Media helpful tool to market your business

Social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, perspectives and media itself. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. These sites typically use technologies such as blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs to allow users to interact. Source: Wikipedia

When marketers want to reach users of social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, or Cyworld, they have two choices: buy advertising or start a viral campaign.New research by Harvard Business School professor Sunil Gupta suggests that viral may be the way to go in these connected worlds. But first it's important to understand both who influences purchase decisions in online communities and which groups of users can be influenced.

Introduction

Social media marketing is a recent component of organizations' integrated marketing communications plans. Integrated marketing communications is a principle organizations follow to connect with their targeted markets. Integrated marketing communications coordinates the elements of the promotional mix—advertising, personal selling, public relations, publicity, direct marketing, and sales promotion—to produce a customer focused message.[1] In the traditional marketing communications model, the content, frequency, timing, and medium of communications by the organization is in collaboration with an external agent, i.e. advertising agencies, marketing research firms, and public relations firms. However, the growth of social media has impacted the way organizations communicate with their customers. In the emergence of Web 2.0, the internet provides a set of tools that allow people to build social and business connections, share information and collaborate on projects online.

Social media marketing

In order for organizations to most effectively use social media for marketing, they must recognize and embrace that the emerging platforms are additional resources to complement and expand their entire marketing arsenals rather than replacements for existing marketing initiatives. Among the goals for which social media can be used are:

•Customer service, e.g. direct response to customer complaints•Broadcasting updates, announcements, news, e.g. additional PR resource•Promotions•Behind the scenes look at the organization•Advertising

Some organizations actively use social media in their marketing plan to keep the brand fresh in customers' and non-customers' minds. Linking with an organization on a social media site allows the organization to stay connected with individuals who may or may not be customers instead of relying on them to initiate a contact only when they are looking for additional information.Social media is an enormous advertising platform. Organizations are able to target individuals based upon specific interests shared on social media. For example, if an individual watches a YouTube video about jogging, a shoe company can serve an ad, or a coffee company can target ads to individuals who post on social media sites that they are tired. Social media has allowed advertisers to refine ad nets extremely narrowly.

How organizations use social media

DellDell Computer has a strong blogging presence with its Direct2Dell forum. Not only is this a chance for bloggers to learn about new products but it has also helped improve the organizations reputation. The amount of negative blogs dropped from 49% to 22% since the start of the site. Dell was able to connect with the customers and immediate address their concerns, comments, and questions through the blog. Dell also made its presence felt on micro-blogging site Twitter through its @DellOutlet account and earned around $3

million sales from Twitter by offering exclusive discounts to its followers

Successful campaigns

Facebook decided to use these demographics to their advantage. Facebook legally owns all the rights to the information that is posted on their website, and created an advertising program that targets the users of Facebook individually by grouping that information together and targeting each individual person with advertisements that will catch their eye. This strategy created a buzz in the advertising world. Previous to this type of advertising, online advertising had not been very effective due to pop-ups and banner's lack of substance. Most people found these annoying and or distracting when using the internet. With Facebook targeting each individual on its website, 400 million users strong, it created a target market for every company. Therefore if a bridal company wanted to advertise on Facebook they could literally make sure their ads were only seen by those whose status says engaged or dating depending on how broad they wanted to go. This allowed Facebook to start using the pay-per-click strategy that many advertisers’ shy away from because of the lack of impact on internet users

With the pay-per-click strategy in effect for Facebook, every time a Facebook user clicks on an advertisement, that company pays Facebook for the ad. Studies have shown that over sixty nine percent of online shoppers use social media like Facebook not only to reach out to people, but also to see what's popular and what are some of the in things. The original pay-per-click strategy was not effective because users did not want to be taken to another page and look at something that did not appeal to them. With Facebook's new targeting system their ratio of clicks per user is astoundingly higher than any other competitor, even Google. This makes sense since the ads appeal to the fact that they are engaged or have an interest in fashion.

How it works

Facebook also created something called Engagement Ads to not only reach out to the advertisers, but also to the Facebook user. This allows three unique experiences for the Facebook user and for social media's. First you can comment on the advertisement which allows the user to say what they like or dislike the ad or the product. These comments can be seen by other Facebook user's friends. Allowing their social group to know that this either sucks or is great and they need to try it. Secondly, gifting friends online with small, free e-gifts has become a popular thing to do. Advertisers can now create free e-gifts for users to give to their friends. Lastly, users can become friends of products and organizations that they like, which links them to the Facebook page of the company that they love. This puts them in a pool of people all over the world who enjoy similar products and allows companies like Apple to see what their target audience actually is.

Engagement Ads

Another major addition to marketing on Facebook is applications. Applications are some of the most used items on Facebook to date. A great example of an application is Farmville. Farmville, which has over 80 million users, has more users than Twitter currently has on its website. The power of such an application on Facebook and its advertising is unheard of. Organizations can create in-game items that help the user's farm, and every person who visits that farm will see the item, advertisement, of the company on that person's farm. This is an effective marketing strategy because not many people see it as “marketing” but rather the company helping you in the game. It also is effective because there is such a wide range of users in Farmville and everyone who visits their site will see the ad.

Advertising through Apps

Facebook Revenues Up to $700 Million in 2009, On Track Towards $1.1 Billion in 2010

"By understanding the social network of users, firms can better understand and influence consumers' behavior,"

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