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What exactly is Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Marketing is another form of internet marketing, through which we seek to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through the participation in various social media networks. Social Media though is a very wide terminology, some of the features it includes social interaction, content, videos, images and audio exposure.
How do we start?
This is the most important and critical part of Social Media Marketing, because if we remember the old saying "fail to plan, and plan to fail" it aptly fits into this form of marketing. Most of us are so obsessed with Online Marketing that we forget to identify business goals, objectives and overall process of execution. When you don't have a plan in place the best of the best techniques fail to give results. We have written below the road map we successfully follow to give consistent results, but we should know what are the top goals of Social Media Marketing…these are the top goals
- Website traffic and user behavior (external and internal tracking)
- Conversion and sales tracking
- Page views, ad exposure
- Growing brand awareness Creating a positive brand association and keeping it there
- Business development and a broader customer reach
- Search Engine Reputation Management
How can you create and convert all this activity with social media?
Most of us know what Blogs alone can do to the websites in terms of traffic generation but as the cyber world keeps evolving, the need for broader foundations and faster results become the vital for your search engine objectives. We CAN convert traffic if we have a appropriate reach. There is a very thin line dividing the appropriate reach techniques and spamming. But this thin line can prove very costly if unwittingly your techniques are classified as spamming.
The following are some of the key measures we take to have a measured approach towards traffic generation. The process below also explains how we integrate the different social media platforms into one huge opportunity to build traffic, convert traffic and manage your search engine reputation.
Don't pour just sprinkle:
Social Media Marketing is always about "them", not "you", this is the golden rule, we take utmost care that we don't talk much about the client, at least in the beginning. Suppose we start by building the client profile on del.icio.us we make sure that other useful resources are bookmarked too and will very subtly push the clients interests.
Why do we sprinkle when other start to pour out?
Like there is a process in place for a SEO campaign(like Keyword research, Competitive Review, Content Analysis, etc.,) similarly there is a process for Social Media Marketing, unfortunately most of the companies don't recognize this and dive in too fast and disintegrate their clients goals even faster.
We contribute content:
This is again because of our consistent research, which shows that while there are too many readers online there is a very small group contributing the content, so we smelt the opportunity and we contribute on our client’s behalf. This gives instant recognition, though communities are considered Queen in Social Media but Content is still the KING.
Conventional Public Relation Theory:
We strongly believe that lot of things are different between the real World we live in and the Cyber World, but there is one common thing between the Virtual World and the Real World and i.e. you have to be niche, be polite, honest, sincere, and committed to have a good Public Relation. We follow this rule to the 'T'
Position:
With both the above strategies we position our clients in the social community circles in such a way that they will be the center of attraction. We provide content on our client's behalf and exercise utmost politeness, sincerity and commitment towards the community.
Blog:
Though most of our competition consider Blogs as the old and not so effective form of Social Media Marketing, we believe that blogs are still have the widest acceptance and is one of the mainstay of our strategies. You would believe us when we say that according to the recent study Technocrati is tracking over 110 Million blogs now and growing at a furious pace.
We Concentrate on Links too:
Links are what search engines and users make good use of - and search engines would not survive without them. But sometimes it should be a give and take policy too(reciprocal).
Videos:
It is one of the important aspect of Social Media Marketing, but as with other forms even Videos should be submitted very tactically to get maximum mileage. Though at any point of time you can be assured of a million views of your video, the most challenging part is how to convert the views into business without trying to sell anything directly. Most of our competitors are not aware that Content plays a very important role in Video submission too. Yes, for some client the "how to…." Or "top tips…." Works perfectly for still other Humor and controversy really works.
Technorati:
Though some of our client claim to have their own blogs we make sure they claim their blog at Technorati. This will ensure you are indexed in their search engines for blogs and updates are broadcast across the network, along with your own blog network updates. Only few competitors know that this process happens behind the scenes from automatic "pings".
Analytics:
We give utmost importance to Analytics because after all the hardwok you would definitely want to monitor the way we are progressing so we regularly update our clients by monitoring regularly at web analytics and track referring domains and review traffic movements daily, weekly and monthly.
Feeds/Research:
Most of the Social Marketing companies are so over obsessed with videos, communities etc., they tend to forget the importance of subscribing to feeds, use iGoogle, My Yahoo Web or other favorite RSS readers. Watching for changes (by using Google.com/alerts), and most importantly like always first impression is the best impression so we make sure that we are among the first to comment and engage in your topic. Because, first commenters often get more visibility and traction.
MicroCommunities:
Though bigger platforms like Technocrati, YouTube,Twitter etc., are very important for visibility, there is no way we can neglct micro communities which are relevant to your nature of business and more importantly we can be heard easily in these small communities than trying to post a Digg which may go no where. Because we know that some times it feels good to be a "Big Fish in a Small Pond".
Submit:
Though there are people doing submissions almost 10-12 hours per day and 6-7 days per week, from our experience we have learnt how to be smart than do a laborious job. But there are some very vital things not to do, i.e. asking your colleagues to post from the same (IP Address) because submissions like these are most likely to be rejected, and worst, your account will be blocked. One of the simple and best ways is to ask your friends to comment and befriends others to do the same. This is the safest way, though there are other techniques.
Hosting:
We tell our clients to take services from the best hosting companies because after all the strategies, planning and cautious aggression, just imagine when you are about to experience a spike in traffic and your server infrastructure disintegrates, you couldn't be more frustrated. Though, most of us tend to put it as the last priority we say our clients it is one of their top priority.
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