The promise of social media marketing often goes unfulfilled. The objective is to create a dialogue with customers, generate traffic to specific websites and/or to generate interest in your offerings. Very often, the key to success is to share adroitly branded and highly relevant content with users who, in turn, pass your content to like-minded people they’re connected to. Your effectiveness at social media marketing can be measured by the demonstrable monetization of your efforts.
The reason so many companies and professionals fall short here is not because social media marketing lacks power. On the contrary, it can be amazingly effective. The reason for a lack of success is quite often:
(1) A lack of understanding of the interplay between the target audiences, of the need to add value and of how to maximize the power of the various social media platforms.
(2) Lack of ability to effectively implement this troika.
Putting the second reason aside, we’re left with needing to know what select audiences are looking for and being able to deliver accordingly. What regularly sets the stage for disappointment is the failure to provide high-caliber content that wows the target audiences.
A core objective of social media marketing — or of a thought leadership campaign, for that matter — is to gain “mindshare.” You want to be top-of-mind when potential clients or customers are interested in products or services you can deliver. You want to provide content your preferred audiences find so appealing and beneficial that they’re motivated to pass it on.
Social media marketers are often most successful when they are exceptional content creators. Being able to develop proprietary customized high-caliber content is commonly the most effective way to develop a solid position as an authority in a particular area. There’s certainly a cost to developing this level of proprietary content. If you lack the abilities or resources to develop your own astounding intellectual content, a reasonable alternative is curating third-party content. By bringing together relatively new ideas and adding some transformative or explanatory and creative elements, you can also position yourself as a leading reputable authority.
Wikipedia: Social media marketing refers to the process of gaining website traffic or attention through social media sites. →
This article speaks to having a good strategic process around marketing efforts as they relate to social media. If you look at it logically, any time you spend money on any form of advertising you generally have a purpose, process & payoff. Being social media can be done for free today, it’s often willy-nilly.
If small and midsize businesses want to get serious about social media, they need a plan. Otherwise, they should scrap their social programs and focus their finite resources elsewhere. Without assigning goals to social media efforts–no matter how basic–there is no way for businesses to determine whether they’re reaping any benefit from their efforts, or simply wasting their time.
Recent data indicates that plenty of SMBs are indeed going social without any defined strategy. The SMB Group’s “2011 Impact of Social Business in Small and Medium Business Study” found that one in five small businesses (1-99 employees) use social media willy-nilly, close to half of all small firms that said they currently use the technology. Midsize firms (100-1,000 employees) are more likely to have a plan, according to the SMB Group study–31% reported using social sites in a “structured, strategic way”–yet nearly one in five still said their social activities remain undefined.
Here is another article from Entrepreneur.com taking another approach about the benefits of using social media and setting expectations.
If you’re not only the CEO, but also the CMO you may be wondering if all of your social media efforts are panning out. According to a new report, you’re not alone.
While 90 percent of marketers now say that social media-related marketing is important for their business, nearly 25 percent are still in the dark when it comes to measuring its effect, according to the third annual Social Media Marketing Industry Report from Michael A. Stelzner, founder of SocialMediaExaminer.com.
The future is mobile. Google realized this a long time ago and directory publishers, review companies, social applications took the leap some time ago. With wireless broadband moving the way it is, could your business be an early adopter?
In July 2010, eMarketer estimated that 23.9 million US mobile users would watch video on their devices at least monthly by the end of the year, which would represent a nearly 30% increase over estimated 2009 levels. Research from Nielsen suggests the jump may have been even larger.
According to the measurement firm’s “State of the Media: Mobile Usage Trends: Q3 and Q4 2010” report, the number of US consumers watching mobile video increased 40% year over year in Q3 and Q4 2010. That brought the total number of US mobile video viewers to just shy of 25 million by the end of the year.
