SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Image by Brian Solis

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social Media Marketing is using today’s growth, popularity and the power of social networks, blogs and online communities such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Linkedin for marketing, sales, public relations and customer service.

The concept is to create a buzz though newsworthy events, videos, tweets or blogs that creates attention and gets shared. It’s basically creating digital word of mouth. The message doesn’t necessarily have to be about a particular product as long as it’s entertaining or compelling (with the company logo and call to action included of course).

The concept is also to build platforms that enable fans of a business or brand to promote their own message about the brand or business. For example fan pages in Facebook and Twitter.

Inbound Marketing VS Outbound Marketing

Inbound Marking is a style of marketing that focuses on getting found by customers on the internet. This is in contrast to Outbound Marketing where advertisers pay for their message to be blasted out in to the market hoping to hit someone and get their attention, think newspaper ads, TV, radio, billboards, cold calling, spam emails, brochures and flyers. We are bombarded by hundreds of thousand outbound marketing interruptions every day, and we are also getting very good at tuning them out.

Inbound Marketing helps your company, business, product or brand get found by people already learning about and shopping in your industry.

Successful Inbound Marketing Campaigns should have three components:

Content – Creative, entertaining, constantly updated and refreshed. This is the basis of Inbound Marketing and is the tool that will attract potential customers, encourage them to return and tell others of your site and business. Instead of just having a static website like a sign by the road that people look at once, content will act like a magnet that will draw them in and keep them returning.

Search Engine Optimization – SEO will make it easier for customers to find your exciting content. Fine tuning the SEO on your site will maximise your search engine ranking where customers start their buying process.

Social Media – Social Media amplifies the impact of your content. This is digital word of mouth in action. When your content is distributed across and discussed on social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter where it becomes authentic and believed.

And remember Outbound Marketing is traditionally expensive, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and all Social Media is free. It’s all about creating clever and interesting content.

Inbound Marketing is not about the width of your wallet it’s about the width of your brain.

The most successful Inbound Marketing campaign the world has seen so far was created right here in Australia, “The Best Job In The World” campaign, all run though a website that attracted worldwide interest and crossed over into mainstream media and news that generated hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free advertising for Queensland. Just type in “Best Job in the World” into Google and see what you get.