Social Networks marketing
Introduction
On social network sites members discuss, share ideas and make recommendation. It has been usually seen that consumers looking for others attitude when they decide to purchase a product or service. Actually, more than 78% of worldwide consumers say they trust recommendation of other people more than other sources like companies marketing message. So consumers use social networks to discover these opinions.
Social network's users play two roles: consume and supply content together. The inventors of content are normally vastly engaged and effective consumers. If right consumers are gained with a message that they recognise useful and interesting, it can become viral advertise. This is extremely powerful for marketers, that users do not sense that the information is pushed to them, but denote to them by trustful friend in a trustful network. Now let investigate three of most popular and influential social networks and see ways of marketing in these famous sites:
Ever since the first days of history, human beings have always networked. We have social instinct that like to get in touch with someone. As the internet start improved and become larger in popularity, people quickly understand the benefit of this novel technology for communication, with instant massaging, e-mail, web pages and sharing data, videos and voice with each other, and many other application to keep everybody in touch. But how can internet help you perform a better job with your professional networking? The answer is LinkedIn. LinkedIn established five years ago by Reid Hoffman, Who decided to generate a better way for professional networking. There are many websites that allow you make your own page and share it with the world. But lots of them focused on social feature of your life and not on the professional side. LinkedIn create new way by its access of all the professional networking activity you do every day. LinkedIn is a social network with over 100 million users that let you to make better use of your professional network. There is no doubt that LinkedIn is a wonderful place to network professionally, inform and find job, answer questions and make leadership idea. It is probably the best way to find important persons at particular organisations. Searching for your target business or subject on this site will identify persons who you may already connected with, moreover directly or in the case of your connections. LinkedIn is a great implement to use your existing connections to contact with others and discover potential clients online. The site is formed to make the aspect of networking less time-consumption and more practical. LinkedIn does not need to consume a huge amount of time or usage to be efficient, and is concentrated on only preparing instruments that help your professional business.
LinkedIn Marketing
There are two types of business endorsement possible in LinkedIn, one for large business and the other for small one. For large firms, LinkedIn has performed company profile pages (it is free) in the case of union with BusinessWeek and Capital IQ that covers 160,000 companies those information collected and accumulated to LinkedIn. Now More than one million companies have LinkedIn Company Pages (formerly known as company profiles).
Marketing your business by LinkedIn contains working through your own network, employing both your current list of contacts as well as potential connections in the bigger LinkedIn communication. Your attempts must have links from you other online activities to your profile in LinkedIn and supporting your business online by your LinkedIn identity. Here are some advices as you developing your LinkedIn marketing plan:
- Encourage every employee to make a LinkedIn profile and link each other.
- Definitely link your profile to you business blog and website.
- You must have your most popular keyword phrases in your profile.
- expand relationships with important business partner or media connections.
Marketing partners:
In LinkedIn your strategy should typically contains more than just you or your business. One element of success in marketing through LinkedIn is finding proper marketing partners to assist you with your targets and push you to the next level. Finally, you are connecting with similar-minded professionals persons who have same or complementary expertise to yours, which helps you and them reach to your goals. Somehow, right partner can make a considerable change in your business growing.
Service providers:
Two main reasons people search LinkedIn are to find a new employee or a job. And now there is a new tool that capitalizes the millions of business-owner who use LinkedIn to improve not only themselves, but their services.
LinkedIn has a Service provider part, where members can write recommendations for service providers they themselves used. Since recommendations are the most important reasons that someone choose one service provider over another, and because many of these service providers exist on LinkedIn it is obvious to let members to recommend each other dependent upon services, not only shared employment.
You should first use the LinkedIn service providers to start recognizing potential partners. You can search for service providers that may two or three layers away from you, or you can focus persons you want to find at specific companies by looking who in your network can organize an introduction. Here is some advice to keep mind during your search:
- Notice to people's title
- Join to groups that request to your business
- Search LinkedIn Answers for persons with same circumstance as yours
- Use targeted questions in LinkedIn Answers and go after the persons who answer the best
- Keep the conversation open and permanent
- Make a LinkedIn group that talk to targeted users about your company's capabilities.
Twitter is huge, both in number of users and enthusiasm. This idea of communicating is continuously developing, and with Twitter you have the chance to access millions of people in a few of seconds. The future of online networking is representing business owners dead because of their slowness in adopting new technology for communication. What if customers stop using the phone and move to somewhere else? Will you be ready?
Twitter is a social network that you can post messages with maximum 140 characters. Since Twitter has members from all around the world, when you send a message, someone in London and someone in New York can read it at the same moment. So imagine the potentials for business! If you know how to send text message from mobile phones, you can approach twitter with no trouble, rules are the same with a difference: In Twitter, you only have 140 characters for communication!
Twitter marketing
Think about a world with millions of millions potential customers that networking, discussing, sharing ideas and forming new communication area. This new form of online network is blasted through traditional communication and marketing and define a world in which association and clients are governing. This world named Twitter. Twitter has blown up, with speed of 1382% growth per year. Now Twitter has 175 million members. while you start your business on Twitter you enter new world of internet marketing that you can talk about your target every day and post your ideas in eruption of 140-character. Twitter has destroyed traditional marketing process and make customer in charge of marketing message. Twitter makes it possible to find your clients fast and easy and contact them with just few keystrokes.
The idea of Twitter comes from micro blogging concept, in which members write short regular posts (even by cell phone) that limited to 140 characters. These posts are called tweets.
Tweets are a type of micro blogging that prepare ability for members to share huge amounts of components by the form of messages that post to specific groups of people. Micro blogging has improved the speed of information ten-time compare to blog post. Blogging is more complicated approach for sharing information and marketing online. Micro blogging is a short term access that is perfect for fast communication. You should use blogging and micro blogging together to success in spreading your business target through your customers and potential market.
When you start to follow others in Twitter, you should share valuable information with them to make them following you, as well. There are various kind of information that your followers may interest in, depending on their interest and target. But they are probably not attracting to read a mass of tweets in a row that you commend your services or products: if you do that, get ready to be unfollowed enormously in twitter. You need to create balance between your marketing messages and personal massages. Together with all these aspects, you also should share other member's useful tweets that post in Twitter, This called retweeting and it is a part of social exchange in Twitter. Retweeting is giving credit to who shared something: It shows that you respect or interest in this user's attitude, ideas or whatever that person shared. When others retweet your post, you can start to take your message out to twitter world, but you should first start retweeting messages that other users posted before asking them to retweet your post. You can become a reference for people that searching for information about the same field that your company working on, and that position can eventually gain you more followers that may become your clients.
In Twitter you rely on your clients to discuss about your business and help you to access to others through these conversations. Twitter is at the head of customer experience, where customers advertise and sell to customers. Companies no longer shape the ideas of brands in their conference room. Customers create private representations of brands in their living rooms, coffee shops and public places by their keyboards. Marketing in Twitter is very different from traditional marketing. Of course, you can help to form the conversations by participating in them but you cannot absolutely control what is going to say about your company. In this social-network world of marketing, you have to take responsibility of your mistakes, correct them and attempt to make sure they won't happen again.
Facebook is a social network with more than 600 million active members and 250000 new daily registrants. The idea of developing Facebook started by Mark Zuckerberg as a dorm exercise to extend the student online communication and now becomes an international association with more than 2000 employee with a valuation of $60 billion. Facebook for man is a social experience, a place to be in contact with old friend, college and family. But in 2007 Facebook developed a revolutionary thing. They created their own virtual oasis that let everyone make applications on Facebook. By this software Facebook has redefined the way of marketing in social-networks, and it will be change the business for ever.
Facebook marketing
If Facebook were a country, it would be 3rd country in population rank after China and India. Imagine the possibility of messaging Facebook nation for free. This is what exactly Facebook did for companies: an online place for organizations, companies and individuals searching for marketing themselves to the world. Facebook pages are entertaining and simple to operate, offer various powerful online tools evolving with your customer (in Facebook called fans), and easy to measure how much you achieved to your target. Every day, 20 million people become fans of Facebook pages each day. That is huge amount of fans. Although famous brands like Coca-Cola, Apple and Nutella enjoy their lots of fan, smaller brands, B2B companies and SMEs can also make loyal followers by developing Facebook pages.
Before online social networks, companies focused their internet marketing plans on their web site. Normally, promotions and advertisements centred on driving internet traffic to the site and measurement of success was traffic volume or such as, how many forms were completed. Now online customer's habits changed by growing of social network communications this making companies twist.
According to http://www.kenburbary.com/tag/facebook/ website the average user on Facebook:
- Spends an average 15 hours and 33 minutes on Facebook per month
- Visits the site 40 times per month
That's why company's websites are no longer enough for marketing on internet, many marketer adapt their marketing plans to evolve in these social activities by merging advertising, promotions, and word of mouth together to drive traffic, awareness, and commitment. And companies are interacting with their customers in these new ways. Facebook has prepared some facility for marketers to engage in the conversations, with high desire for member's privacy. There is no specific or defining characteristics, old, young, male, female, white, black, no limit. The fastest growing in Facebook members is among women 55 and above, teenagers are 12% of members, but by total users, the fastest growing group is 26 to 34.
Here is some avenue for marketing on Facebook:
-Creating a Facebook application:
By using the Facebook developer platform you can create Facebook applications. This platform using a specific coding language called FBML (Facebook Mark up Language). It is a kind of XML that designed especially for Facebook. But most marketers do not know how to coding XML, so there are some websites that make Facebook apps for you, like Zembely.com. When your application gets more than 5 common users, then you can send it to the Facebook Application Director, where it can be searched by the whole Facebook members. Applications are very useful because you can send updates on application to all common users, and these application fans are great potential customers for your marketing target.
-Creating a Facebook fan page:
An excellent approach is to make a page for your business on Facebook. When you create the page, then add "Become A Fan" widget to your blog our website, this widget contains photos and names of your fans, and it is an advertisement to encourage people to become your fan. Same as Facebook apps, here you can send updates like important events, invitations and e-mails to all of your fans.
-Creating a Facebook Ads: Become A fan
Another way that Facebook provides for marketers is "Become A Fan" engagement Ads. If you are a Facebook user, you've seen these ads. The exclusivity of these ads is, they are not advertise selling service or products, rather they sell ideas that wish to achieve followers who can be future customers. By clicking on thumbs up icon users become a fan automatically, and updates send to all fans, but engagement ads is not free and can get expensive, it starts by min $0.01 and sometimes rises to $2 or $3 per click.
Here is some Facebook statistics from: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
People on Facebook
- More than 500 million active users
- 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
- Average user has 130 friends
- People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook
Activity on Facebook
- There are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages)
- Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
- Average user creates 90 pieces of content each month
- More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.
Global Reach
- More than 70 translations available on the site
- About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
- Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application
Platform
- Entrepreneurs and developers from more than 190 countries build with Facebook Platform
- People on Facebook install 20 million applications every day
- Every month, more than 250 million people engage with Facebook on external websites
- Since social plugins launched in April 2010, an average of 10,000 new websites integrate with Facebook every day
- More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook, including over 80 of comScore's U.S. Top 100 websites and over half of comScore's Global Top 100 websites
Mobile
- There are more than 200 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
- People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
- There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products
At the end, in accordance to what I mentioned above, we can see it is vital for companies to have flexible marketing strategies by awareness of what will come in future. Frankly, you can they cannot escape social networks. Even the U.S. State Department has a Facebook and Twitter account, and they even performed a social networking site on their own server. The benefits of marketing on social networks are plentiful and can gain at very low cost. Let's count some of these benefits:
- increase web traffic
- increase customer loyalty
- improve Search Engine Optimization(SEO)
- increase new product launches success
- increase awareness of brand and product
References:
1) LinkedIn For Dummies, by Joel Elad, 2008
2) How to use LinkedIn for business, by Karen Purves, 2009: www.Havemoreclients.com
3) Guide to social media marketing V.2, 2009 GNOSIS ARTS MULTIMEDIA COMMUNICATIONS LLC
4) How to use LinkedIn for business, www.HubSpot.com
5) Facebook Marketing For Dummies, by Paul Dunay and Richard Krueger, 2010
6) Online Marketing Opportunity Report: Social Media, Blog, and Search Engine Activity by Industry: www.HubSpot.com
7) Social Network Marketing: The Basics, 2008 Red Bridge Marketing
8) The Only Marketing Jobs Definite Guide to: Helping you maximise your business networking potenyial, www.onlymarketingjobs.com
9) Twitter Marketing For Dummies, by Kyle Lacy with contributions from Manny Hernandez
10) www.Facebook.com
11) www.LinkedIn.com
12) www.Twitter.com
About the Author
Name: Amin Moazami (Mr)
Address: Robson Condominium, Syed Putra, KL Maaysia
Phone: +60126152127
Email: amin.moazami65@Gmail.com
DoB: Feb 15, 1987
• 2006-2010, B.Sc. Civil Engineering, Bahonar University, Kerman, Iran
• 2011, Student at Master of Business Administration (MBA), Management & Science university, Kuala Lampur, malaysia
Social Media Marketing - What Every Business Owner Needs To Know
[simpleaffiliate source="amazon" results="10"]marketing plans for dummies[/simpleaffiliate]
[simpleaffiliate source="cj" results="10"]marketing plans for dummies[/simpleaffiliate]
[simpleaffiliate source="clickbank" results="10"]marketing plans for dummies[/simpleaffiliate]
No comments:
Post a Comment