What is social media? Generally speaking social media is user-generated online content that gets shared across communities. It allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal, political and business use. Social Media is widely regarded as a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. From an academic point of view, some even regard social media as the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers.
Social media marketing is the act of using social influencers, social media platforms, online communities for marketing, public relations and customer service.
There is a wide range of social media tools to be considered for your social media marketing strategy, and the list changes every day. In summary, social media range from communication (blogs, social networking) and collaboration (Wikipedia, social bookmarking), to multimedia sharing (YouTube, Flickr), reviews, opinions and entertainment.
Which social media tools for marketing?
More social media tools are appearing on the net every day. For business use and social media marketing it is advisable to focus on the most popular social media applications so that your social media marketing strategy can leverage the number of potential customers that can be contacted. Using the most popular social media tools for marketing also allows your business to take advantage of the large number of participants and a well established context for business use.
Disadvantages of Social Media Marketing
There is a plethora of reasons, why well established companies are afraid of branching out into social media marketing – they fear the disadvantages of social media marketing could outweigh the advantages.
These disadvantages should be detailed in your business’ social media marketing strategy where the benefits and limitation of social media marketing should be analyzed to determine whether it’s the right strategy for your business, your marketing goals, and your marketing budget.
For many businesses, the time investment required for many social media marketing tools is an alarm bell or a red flag. The time spent marketing on social media should be closely monitored to assess whether the return in website traffic, promotion of your business brand, distribution of your business content, and resulting leads and sales is worth the investment in time and resources.
This is the first post in a series of articles on social media marketing. Are there any particular topics within this series you’d like to know more about? Leave your feedback below.
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i do Social Media Marketing specially when promoting a new website or an affiliate product. Social media is more effective than offline advertising in my opinion.
Right now, web 2.0 is a mash of marketing on business and personal levels. The lines are so blurred that it’s already generally accepted (and expected) for people to market anything at anytime.
@ Michelle – I agree that social media is in many ways more effective than offline advertising – especially with a limited marketing budget where the business owner has to choose between one or the other. With social media marketing products are often recommended or endorsed by others, so the marketing already includes validity by providing ‘social proof’.
@Gabe I think the line between business and personal levels is not yet entirely blurred on web 2.0 – it depends very much on the market segment. I think the segments where it is most blurred are entrepreneurs and business owners (especially offline business) – least blurred in my opinion is the web 2.0 participation of people who are conventionally employed – they often don’t have anything to market or sell and use social media solely to connect and participate in discussions.
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