The world on internet marketing has changed and many people are confused if not totally baffled about how to approach the new world of social networks. Social networks have gained momentum and changed the common practice of just worrying about if you are found, but what are people saying about you and how do you keep them talking about you. This revolution for the internet has improved consumer knowledge as well as to allow everyone have a voice. From experience, I have seen many businesses look at social media as just another place to advertise, but they are missing the point of the true power of it. Social media is the modern way to conduct the best form of advertising, “Word Of Mouth”. Most businesses take social media as a form of just “Advertising” but are missing the key part of social networks as well as marketing in general, STAY INVOLVED WITH YOUR PUBLIC. Social media offers you the chance to interact with your customers and possible future customers on a massive level by being interactive and getting them involved. Taking advantage of social networking is easy, but you have to have a plan and you need to pay attention to where you are publishing. Each social network has it’s own themes and type of followings, you must address your audience and their particular interest, but not just lecture them, but get them involved, that is the point to being interactive, in fact it’s called being “SOCIAL”. In the next blog posts, we will go over each of the main social networks and what their target audiences are; this is just a general covering. Getting a plan together is crucial for your target audience on how to get them to be interactive and how to get the right results. Most internet marking firms concentrate on “likes” real or fake, just to give you a sense that you are popular and maybe you might get a couple sales for all that effort. To be really involved, what you want is to become “VIRAL”, this is where everyone else on the networks are spreading your message voluntarily or in other words, “WORD OF MOUTH”. Viral marketing is what made social network marketing famous, to get millions of people excited about you based upon a promotion, stunt, or campaign that can get people talking and visiting you, not from posting annoying ads or “inspirational” speeches that act as spam. Making a well thought out plan based upon your targeted audience and how to get them to make your service viral without spamming them is the goal with a successful campaign. Development of your plan is the next key phase. Just like with anything, people don’t like to be directed away from their favorite spot to learn more about you. Developments comes into play to now integrate your plan into the social network rather than to steer traffic, this means to take your products and service to the crowd, rather then steering the crowd to you. I know, sounds like opposite of what marketing companies tell you about getting traffic, but in reality it’s not about getting traffic, but getting sales. Each main social network gives you tools to develop with, called SDK’s, API’s, and Sandboxes, to bring your services and products to them and the crowds of people, now your plan is to make it entertaining enough to make it viral. The last step to a good social media campaign is deployment; it’s all about how you now introduce it to your targeted audience. Now that you have your plan developed and you find it entertaining to the audience you want while introducing them to your products and or service, then you can now launch it through groups, clubs, organizations, and mass people. You need to monitor this, as the first plan is rarely ever right, watch their responses and see how traffic is going to the new tolls on the social networks and make adjustments according to the data. Think of it now as tuning up your car, you have it running, but maybe a bit bumpy. There is no real correct technique to this, but there is a lot of psychology behind it, to truly make it viral, you must know your audience. Now that you are gaining traffic from your tools you have launched on the social networks, hopefully in the development you included tokens, you will get back a lot of data. Data mining is common practice, even if your first app, tool, widget, or marketing campaign doesn’t do as well as expected, with the data it will always pay you back. With most social networks like Facebook, you can use tokens to collect a huge amount of data from the people that share and use your tools. This data includes their interests, locations, family, friends, likes, school, work, and so on, basically anything they share including pictures and movies. I’m sure you have seen targeted marking based upon things you may have shared before, then wondered how they knew so much about you, well, now you know. Please leave comments and feedback as this blog will continue with more specifics, let us know what you would like to know.
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