Marketers are continually hopping onto social media marketing as a perfectly productive means of reaching out to more and more people. Even if they are not able to measure the numbers yet, they are keen on using this tool as an effective means of creating the right buzz about themselves.
With enormous statistics produced by Facebook as an example, the Social Media space is one aspect that marketers, globally cannot afford to miss. In an innovative big to promote itself, Aquafina created a contest on video networking website MySpace for users to create a winning video. The reward was a trip to none-other-than the Sundance Film Festival. The brand has profiled itself on MySpace since 2006, filling in with podcasts and film festival updates. This was one of their most innovative and effective ways to reach out to the film community. The influence that social media marketing of this kind provides cannot be met with a single line ad.
Closer home, even Bollywood [s1] films are now are getting promoted on Facebook, YouTube and Orkut. Hence the films are getting popular even before it is released and the reader profile perfectly complimented the audience the film required.
Social media marketing can be a tricky game. If your existence on the web is simply a platform for your company, you might want to get involved with B2B media marketing that allows you to access the communities you specifically want to target. You can access this on networks like ITtoolbox or LinkedIn.
On the other hand, you can involve more publicly by hosting podcasts, webcasts and blogs for your brand on the numerous social networking websites with their readership of anything like a million. Since people are talking about you anyway, you might as well don the discussion hat and play along. It will only benefit your brand. Even companies to for better reach are making a series of online educational & promotional videos, podcasts and screencasts, available on the social media sites YouTube, Ning and Facebook. The famous bollywood actor Amitab Bachan, Aamir Khan and other are hooked to blogging. Marketing experts like Dale Wolf runs the perfect customer experience management (www.perfectcem.com) blog, Steve Kayser’s Expert Access newsletter has managed to achieve a phenomenal global subscription base of nearly 141,000 subscribers. These examples truly accentuate the importance of these next generation tools for marketers.
Twitter is another tool that companies all across are extensively using to connect with their customer, partners & son on. My small research on companies & big names on Twitter could be accessed here. Additionally Peter’s enormous task showcase the companies that have embrace the Social Media could be accessed here and my take on it here
For those who have still not recognized the perfectly simple and productive marketing tool that social media provides, it is time to wake up and smell the coffee. There is no challenging the tremendous traffic that a good posting can attract. These will be people who can add to your business and a lot of them will be ones who will keep coming back to your website.
Thanks to Web 2.0 you can use this master of a marketer to attract more links to your website or the company. The idea is to create a posting or an advertisement that connects to the user on the website you are choosing to harness. Added to this is the low cost advantage that all of us are eventually happy to employ. Search engines also pick up websites that receive natural links from known domain names. These are some first hand advantages of social media marketing that many of us are meaning to ignore so very far into its development.
It’s easy to assume that most of the traffic generated thus will not be productive. But a trend that has been noticed is that while initially you might see a spurt of visitors, the numbers will stabilize soon after. And this will be the number to reckon with. It could be clients, customers, partners, potential partners, All of whom need to be on your list. It is also not presumptuous to say that a lot of the secondary traffic that visits your website could be people interested in what you provide.
Simply advertising on Web 2.0 is an efficient means of attracting traffic to your website. Because the number of users is so high on this case, it adds to the traffic you will eventually attract. Again, the only trick is to make it available to your target audience because the click, as we all know, is only a flick of a second.
While the profits of such marketing do not add up immediately or even evidently, it will generate a linkage on the web that will support your business through mentions, connects and recommendations. Social media marketing perfectly compliments your other forms of marketing. It can even be a support system for you as this is one means of communication that has no time span or recurring costs involved.
Another term touted with as much ease as social media marketing these days is ‘social media optimization’. With this, brands aim to alter their website such that it makes it easily searchable and receives more mention on blogs and podcasts etc. Adding a blog to your own website is a greater way of going about it. If your website is static, it will get more dynamic with regular updates and with several links connecting to anything that you post.
Social media marketing can therefore be a great means to promote your site through social media networks as well as within 3D worlds like Second Life and There.com.
Instead of randomly rushing through this sea of information, marketers prefer to build on a specific idea for brand awareness and then encourage brand attention and feedback with increased albeit more casual visibility. What cautions them is the user feedback that can also be negative. But one cannot forget that users in this case also become contributors and when the product is good, gladly act as ambassadors. As more threads are attached to your name, viral marketing picks up at an unprecedented pace. And this is where the crux of the game lies.
Marketers are therefore now busy fine tuning themselves to the new needs of this growing media that cannot be ignored. Social media marketing is far removed from traditional concepts of marketing. This makes it a more challenging medium but one that can be most effective in the medium to long run.
Intellectuals are still pondering over measurements that most correctly define the reach of this new media. There are four broad measures identified so far—audience, content tracking, online media analysis and online market research. Whatever the measurements and whatever its reach, opinion is unanimous for social media marketing. There seems to be nothing like it in the near future.
[s1]The Indian Film Industry like Hollywood
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