Social Media Marketing

Throughout the ages, town markets have provided a place for people to meet, socialize and trade information as well as to buy products.

Nowadays the marketplace is moving online. The trend is swift, inevitable and a critical key to small business success. In fact, having a company website has become as much a requirement of doing business in the 21st century as printing business cards was in the last century—perhaps more so.

But the way potential customers are spending their time on the Internet is changing rapidly. “Surfing the web” is already an outmoded practice, replaced by the use of powerful search engines and “feeds” that deliver customized news and content. This is affecting how information is found and exchanged and inevitably how purchase decisions are made.

For example, U.S. Army recruiters have long used GoArmy.com as a tool for attracting enlistees. Since 2009, however, they have noticed a shift in how young men and women learn about opportunities for a military career. Potential recruits are now much more likely to seek information on another website, FaceBook, where the GoArmy page has been “liked” by more than 128,000 visitors to date.

 

 

The FaceBook Phenomenon

In early 2011, a blockbuster movie called the “Social Network” zoomed to the top of the charts and won three Academy Awards, earning nearly $100 million for its producers. It was the story of FaceBook and its youthful inventor, Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg came up with a website that allowed people to share their interests, photos and thoughts with friends—friends from all levels of school, friends from work, family and church, friends met through other friends, neighbors who are friends…the list goes on and on.

In Zuckerman’s own words, his goal was to “create a richer, faster way for people to share information about what was happening around them.” Interfacing online with friends and mutual friends they have in common is social networking. And where networking is possible, so is marketing.

 

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Tapping into Social Media

Today, FaceBook is a $50 billion company. It has some 350 million members. It consumes fully 10% of all the time that users worldwide spend on the Internet, and the numbers are still growing. It is a phenomenon unlike any ever seen in the world of communications, making the growth of network television in the 1950s look miniscule by comparison.

And FaceBook is by no means alone. When you add in other social networking vehicles like YouTube and Twitter, roughly half of all 800 million Internet users worldwide are just a mouse click, shared photo or text message away. This is the new global marketplace.

To reach social network users requires establishing a presence within their online communities. It means being seen as one of them, liked by their friends and worthy of referral to others. It takes multiple modes of contact. It demands a new strategy suited to the medium. In short, it requires social media marketing.

 

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The Explosion of Viral Marketing

More than ever before, advertising guru Marshall McLuhan’s words ring true: “Medium is the message.” On the Internet, the medium is text, images and audio that can easily be passed from one person to another. What was once known as lowly “word of mouth” advertising has zoomed to the apex of the promotional pyramid.

Take, for instance, a funny commercial video clip on YouTube that gets seen by a few fans. They send the link to all of their friends, who like it and pass the link on to their own network of contacts, who in turn do the same. This referral process quickly cascades into millions of views of the video clip. Just like an infection, the commercial message has gone “viral.”

Taking full advantage of networking, social media marketing reaches out to like-minded individuals who trust one another’s opinions and information. Once a marketer has been introduced and accepted into one circle of contacts, it is relatively easy to gain access to others. All it takes is the right tools.

 

Beyond Trial and Error

One could easily spend weeks and months learning the ins and outs of Google, Yahoo, Twitter, YouTube and FaceBook. Fortunately, however, there is no need to reinvent the wheel in order to getting moving on the highway of social media marketing opportunities. Everything needed to make social networks work for small businesses is readily available—from search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to external link builders, affiliate programs and more.

But the clock is ticking. Competitors are already rolling along and using social media marketing to their own advantage. The time to hop on the social media bandwagon is now, while networking is continuing to speed forward by quantum leaps and bounds. Why not start today?