What Is Social Media Marketing?
In essence, social media marketing is a type of marketing strategy that uses the huge traffic generated by social media sites to redirect visitors to another site (as in a corporate website or sales page), draw attention and awareness (as in advertisement campaigns and viral contents) or merely collect relevant hits/visits/clicks to rank higher in search engine result pages (SERP). Ultimately, all the efforts aim at converting the public’s attention and curiosity into sales, whether through direct purchases like in the case of Amazon Affiliate Program, or advertising fees like in the case of Google Adsense and other Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertisements.
A social media marketer practically takes advantage of the large networks and memberships that social media sites have, and uses them as marketing leads. This natural flow of traffic enables marketers to save time and resources by minimizing, if not totally eliminating, marketing research and lead generation. Social media marketing also provides a good set of viable leads as netizens, especially those who are very active with online interactions and transactions, spend more time on the internet, which is the primary medium of this marketing effort.
Compared to television viewers and radio listeners, social media site habitués have higher chances of staying active much longer. Also, they tend to throw more attention and focus on online activities compared to merely watching advertisements from televisions or fleetingly listening to radio advertisements. For instance, a Facebook addict has a higher possibility of going interactive compared to a couch potato who sits hours and hours in front of a television without the guarantee of attentively picking up advertising messages.
For this kind of marketing effort to work, the channel used should be so compelling to urge users to share it, and the message should be strong enough to appear convincing or entertaining. The top social media websites are Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Yelp and various blogging platforms.
Many experts consider social media marketing as the ultimate marketing strategy because of its limitless boundaries, effortless methods, simpler systems and very affordable applications. Basically, everyone with basic knowledge of social media sites can do this strategy, whether for commercial purposes or personal gains. Merely updating status on a daily basis and getting interested followers for it is already marketing in itself. Some people just take it a step further by urging there followers to do or act on something.
Why choose social media marketing?
What makes this strategy the most practical choice is its endless reach, convenient accessibility, infinite influence and affordable application. You can launch an online business simply with social media marketing as the sole means of promotion. Similarly, most businesses nowadays already have their own social media page where there followers can see updates, news and leave comments.
It has many advantages that businesses, big or small, should never ignore.
- Real time – Marketing campaigns encompassing new advertisements, press releases, promotional updates and customer interactions are all happening real-time over social media. It creates a more interactive set-up that allows the target market to engage more and learn more about the campaign all at the same time as other social media users and as the brand or company updates its contents. Feedback and success become instant as in the case of viral marketing.
- Seems more credible – Many people see print ads and TV commercials as propagandas that are all commercially motivated. This is the reason why some people disregard traditional advertisements and infomercials as nothing but ploys. On the other hand, marketing campaigns launched through social media marketing are taken by users as mostly entertainment and just partly promotional. Marketing contents shared from user to user also seems more reliable, especially when the users belong to the same group.
- Inexpensive – Social media marketing is practically word-of-mouth, so the campaign message finds its way to its target market even without follow-ups from the marketer. Sharing, liking, rating and reposting are just some ways of information dissemination that are executed by the target market themselves. There are also ways for ad placements that do not involve payments or distributors like ad vendors.
- Accessible and highly convenient – Marketing campaigns through the social media can reach its market anytime and anywhere as the internet is accessed on various platforms that are handy and personal, such as computers, tablets and mobile phones. Unlike traditional channels that only have limited applications, the internet is practically present anywhere. Hence, it works virtually in every place with internet access. Even televisions now have internet capabilities. The internet has already overtaken television as the primary channel of marketing, and its potential is still limitless.
- Easy to manage – Traditional marketing platforms have to be closely managed and monitored, and that is absolutely time-consuming and expensive. On the other hand, social media marketing can survive even with just two phases: launching and assessment. Because social media sites are interactive channels, users do the promotion themselves.
- Covers all media – Print as a medium only carries printed materials. TV is only effective with video while radio works only with audio campaigns. With the internet, it can cover advertisements in any form (e.g. video, audio, graphic), article campaign in any form (e.g. press release, blog) and any media that are yet to be developed.
- Unlimited run – What is put in the internet stays in the internet forever. Social media marketing campaigns can always be revived and gain online success all over and over again, as seen on viral videos that only gain massive public attention months or years after their initial uploading. As opposed to TV and radio campaigns that have limited runs, and print campaigns and other offline marketing strategies that are mostly ephemeral, the influence of social media is definitely infinite.
- Random and targeted – Targeted marketing on traditional media have big limitations. They mostly rely on viewership based on statistics and not on real-time and actual user data. Social media marketing, on the other hand, can be a direct marketing or indirect marketing, as the marketer has the capacity to send messages directly to specific people and group, as in the case of Facebook and LinkedIn.