Since the inception of internet, everything that we do in our lives has undergone a tremendous change. It is not just the lifestyles that have changed but also the ways, almost all the businesses across the globe are conducted. If we compare the ways, between the way business was conducted 15 years back and the way we do today, there has seen a drastic difference and this change or rather evolution has been brought in by internet.
Today, if we want to find any information, they go directly to internet first to look more information about the product or the service and since the information is available 24*7 and to people all over the globe. People nowadays prefer to check out on the virtual world well before conducting the exact business deal. People have internet access at their homes, office, cars and in even in their pockets. No wonder Google has 200 million look ups every single day, people are certainly looking for products or services providers. There are tons of sites online which are making it easy for an average user to get their contents online and these sites are referred to as social media because they use media and since one is interacting with so many people on these sites, they are quite social. The biggest challenges people have while trying to market their business through social media is where to start, how to effectively use their time and how do they work together. The best is to ‘Know’ the followings.
Know the foundation
The foundation for social media marketing is the most crucial and understated aspect in the domain. Creating the right and apt content for publishing, which would be effective, is the foundation. People watch great TV shows because it’s got great content – humorous, entertaining or educational. So, for the message to be conveyed, one has to develop great content and then get it out there and break through because web is crowded. There are 15 million websites and more 150 million blogs and over 2 billion internet users globally; it is a very crowded space. So it is very important to cut through and get noticed, especially if you want your project in media or talked about.
Know your hub
Your website or your blog is your hub, there where you create and publish your content, and you own it and that’s the reality. You don’t own facebook or twitter and in fact if you break their rules, they will catch you off. It very important to start with a correct foundation which is the great content and to promote it, you will have to have a ‘hub’, where you exactly publish the content.
Know the medium
Today everyone wants to know how to use social media for business. Social media has not been in existence for long, facebook started in 2004 and twitter has been around only since 2006, everyone is still trying to get used to how to use it for marketing for they were not started as a business marketing channels but as a medium to connect with peers and friends online. Facebook with more than 800 million users, it has proved to be very popular and very well used. Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube are some other medium to name.
Facebook with more than 800 million users, it has proved to be very popular and very well used. Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube are some other medium to name. Although social media is working its way into business marketing, to play it safe, many businesses turn to marketing consulting firms for advice and guidance since social media marketing is fairly new.
Know the benefits of social media
The most important benefit is that it gives the business leverage, it is very important from the multiply point of view. You can share with many people on facebook or twitter and they can share with their friends as well and that creates an exponential effect and if you are lucky you can go viral. However, this doesn’t happen very often and so one to has to earn the right, the right to spread the messages on twitter or facebook.
But before knowing the fundamentals of social media marketing, one has got to look into the strategy because lots of people have facebook account, twitter account, YouTube channel and LinkedIn account. One has to be more strategic then just randomly posting or sharing on any of these medium. So, one has got to create an implementing strategy. And it starts with knowing the target audience is, where they hang out, are they on facebook or LinkedIn or YouTube. May be facebook is not where the target audience for some business, though it is the brightest star in the sky, it may not be the best avenue for a certain business.
It is therefore, very important to know the target audience to implement plans in order to achieve the goals. It is also very vital to measure and monitor the plans implemented to achieve the goals and finally modify or repeat the exact plan to achieve the goal. So the bottom line is, to conduct social media marketing successfully, one has the to implement the right and appropriate strategy, make sure that one has the right resources and also look into the ways of accelerating the pace of getting the social media messages across and most importantly one has to patient and persistent, remember, this will not happen overnight.
