888-883-9428

DIY Social Media

The Benefits of Social Media

Social media, when used correctly, can provide an environment for creating relationships, gaining insight from direct interactions and building awareness with a group of users that can, and probably already are, influencing your market.

Social media marketing is simply the process of using these new communication tools developed for the social media landscape to interact with people and in the process, generate exposure and learn what is going on in the marketplace.

Adding Social Media to Your Marketing Mix

Social media does not replace traditional marketing – it is just added to the marketing mix.
Social media tools are an element or a tactic - part of a marketing plan, which hopefully is fed by a marketing strategy.

Social media has some very different characteristics from traditional marketing (online and offline):

	Traditional Marketing	Social Media
Communication	Mostly one way – outbound	Two way
Messaging	Carefully crafted	Free form, information sharing
Largest portion of cost	Money	Time
Target	Demographic groups	Individuals
Time frames	Campaign focused	Continual
Goal	Impressions, conversions	Relationships, trusted advisor status, subject matter expert

Social Media Goals

Establishing reasonable expectations and goals from social media marketing is an important first step when adding social media to the marketing mix.

Examples of goals include:

Gaining feedback and connecting with existing customers
Brand exposure
Product and/or service marketing
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Reputation management
Increased website or blog traffic

Social Media Best Practices

Social media best practices can be summarized in two words: trust and transparency.

Trust is gained from creating an environment where you interact with real people, learn from them, listen to them and don’t pitch your product until the privilege has been earned.
Transparency is being authentic and honest in your communication.

Social media users can spot an abuser in a few statements and with the unfriend or unfollow button a click away, it is important to respect their environment.

Numerous companies sign up for an account, gain some followers, install free social media management software, set up automated posts and begin blasting away.

Effective social media marketing? While as annoying as the telemarketer calling at dinner, it works for some companies. However, most companies do not want their brand associated with such practices and it violates nearly everything that social media is truly about.