What is Social Media Marketing

The Defition of Social Media

Social media is verb. It's the act of creating and posting content in any and all of the following hosted environments: online, mobile, virtual, or as yet to be named. Social media are a continually changing set of tools (and their users) that facilitate online relationships and information sharing.

The key concept behind social media is that it is shared with those that you iden­tify as friends or followers an inner circle (which can in fact be quite large) that has opted in to view any content or information you opt to share, thereby making it the act of being social online.

Social media often consists of extending your personal and brand identity into a setting where it is observed by others who have chosen to pay attention to you. in this respect, social media is much like attending a dinner party. Indeed, many of the same rules of societal participation at dinner parties apply. You don't want to be the person running around with a lampshade on your head or, worse yet, the one that no one wants to talk to and politely wanders off to the appetizer table.

Social media is also a medium. Like print, broadcast, radio, it is a method of communication. Unlike print, broadcast, and radio, however, it can be shared with many people in a scalable way. It would be very strange to describe TV as a verb. That's because watching TV is mostly a passive experience, as is reading print and listening to radio. The consumer is receiving. With social media, how­ever, it is very possible to foster an exchange a give and take with consumers. Take CNN, for example; it asks its viewers to give them feedback on Twitter.

One major difference between the social media channel and other communications channels is that in the social media channel, people has the power - the ultimate democracy.

Importance of Social Media to Businesses

A well implemented social media marketing program will help companies to enhance their potential for ehanced collaboration, cost reductions and increased departmental efficincy. Through social media monitoring businesses can get valuable data on market intelligence and nea instant customer feedback. If employ dedicated tools to acquire and analyse data its possible to get valuable market intelligence data, comsumer intelligence and ROI estimation from social media channels

Online Reputation Management via Social Media Optimization

Social Media has given out the power to masses. Anyone on the web can talk badly about any business or any person anytime they want. If someone has posted negative content about your business or profile, thousands of people could be seeing it all over the world. And it's there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year.

People do significant research online about the products and brands they are interested in buying, including reading reviews, blog posts, tweets and forums. The opinions of others in the online community carry a lot of weight in the minds of today's consumer. The difference between three and four stars in an online review can mean a shift away from one brand and toward another.

Data from a recent survey of 3000 consumers from the Society of New Communications Research stated that “74% (of consumers) choose companies/brands based on others’ customer care experiences shared online.” This statistical data supports what many individuals and companies had to find out the hard way, for most people, the information they read online directly correlates with the opinions they form (and often the purchases they make).

How Can I Help ?

• Strategic social enterprise planning & development
• Social & technographic audience-specific research
• Intelligence, metrics and trend reporting
• Strategic counsel
• Social media marketing, campaign and communications planning
• Hands-on education, training and coaching
• Customized educational workshops
• Conceptual development, setup and implementation of social media contests, sweepstakes and promotions
• Drafting / developing social media policy for employees
• Assistance / counsel with hiring a social media manager and/or building a work group
• Building social media centers of excellence
• Online influencer outreach
• Project management
• Social media integration with events / conventions / trade shows / conferences
• Social media program audit