Need for a Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social Media Strategy – An Introduction

Social media strategy is the process of devising and implementing plans and tactics to optimally harness the power of social media for promotional and marketing purposes. In other words, it is the plan of action for using social media optimization effectively for commercial marketing.

History

The use of social media marketing dates back to the emergence of social media in late 1950s where hackers used a technique called phone-phreaking for manipulating the audio frequencies of the telephone lines to make long-distance or international calls.

Commercial employ of social media however dates back to the 1970s when CompuServe pioneered the use of social media for its consumer services division, the CompuServe Information Service. Prodigy later joined the race of providing online services during mid 1980s.

Since then, social communities and social networking sites have been, and are being used for promoting goods and services owing to their enormous user base and scope providing endless business possibilities.

However, strategic use of social networking communities for commercial marketing began with the advent of The Global Network Navigator (GNN) in 1993 that became the first web-publication to offer clickable advertisements or banner-ads.

Why Strategize?

For any organization to prove its market presence, it needs to be visible to its customers. Customers are adopting newer and more sophisticated ways of communication. Hence, organizations need to understand and match pace with the current communication trends to enhance their visibility in these dimensions.

Social media provides an array of promotional possibilities using various communication media that allow organizations to achieve a better customer outreach by harnessing their potentials.

How to promote and what methods needs to be employed for effectively promoting the organization itself or it’s good and services on the social media needs to be planned carefully for achieving the desired benefits. This process of planning promotions through the social media while considering the business requirements and other factors is called a social media strategy.

Commercial Benefits of Social Media Strategy
A social media strategy helps an organization in the following ways:

Improves Accessibility - Social media strategies improve access not only to the consumer population but also aid reach out to potential business alliances. It helps improve consumer outreach while opening endless avenues to increase the possibilities of earning potential customers and business contacts. An organization can access its customers using a number of media options and while also seeking relieve from other business ventures. It opens global dimensions for direct businesses, processes and customers interaction. Effective social media strategies can greatly impact the global accessibility of any business.

Improves the Brand Image - By targeting and planning the outreach effectively, an organization can execute and improve on its imprint image by utilizing the social media to announce promotional events, seek direct feedback and improve their goods and services in real-time based on the grunt consumer feedback. By promptly addressing to the concerns raised by the consumers, an organization can help build the trust and reliability that is important for an organization’s brand image.

While the social media does have an exhaustive outreach, a negative word once spread and not addressed in time can be fatal to an organization’s image. Hence, strategizing and preparing for such situations is essential when promoting an organization using the social media. In such cases especially, the need of social media strategies becomes imperative.

Improves Quality of Services - An organization’s responsibility towards the customer increases tremendously as it proves its global presence using the social media. Maintaining the competency and quality of goods and services then becomes a necessity for the organization.

Improves Costs – Marketing or promoting an organization using the traditional media is expensive and unalterable. Social media allows direct promotions using the community networks by the word-of-mouth which is an inexpensive plan of meeting promotional targets. This works two-ways. First, it helps reach out to more customers. Second, it does not involve any investment. Frail media on the other hand involves exceptional usage of exhaustive technologies to promote a product. Social media gains an edge over the traditional media here by providing user-friendly tools that enable zero-cost and effortless promotions.

By devising effective social media strategies, an organization can decrease its operational costs incredibly by eliminating the need for employing external agencies for their promotional requirements and reducing the costs of advertising on traditional media while still increasing its consumer base and increasing their sales.

With the increased ease-of-use of social media, newer, zero-cost businesses and business possibilities are emerging that can be set-up without any initial investment but continue to provide profits throughout the life of the venture.

Strategizes Business Decisions - While maintaining pace with the newer communication trends, the businesses or organizations can improve their business competition by conducting real-time surveys using a variety of social communication media to analyze their and the competitor’s business performances. This helps formulate informed business decisions that directly impact the organization’s performance.

Statistics of the Popular Social Media Sites

Facebookis ranked No. 2 in Alexa website rankings http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/facebook.com accounting for 26% of the global internet users.

YouTube is ranked No. 4 in Alexa website rankings http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/youtube.com accounting for 22% of the global internet users.

Wikipediais ranked No. 6 in Alexa website rankings accounting for 11.5% of the global internet users.

Bloggeris ranked No. 7 in Alexa website rankings accounting for 10.8% of the global internet users.

MySpaceis ranked No. 11 in Alexa website rankings accounting for 4% of the global internet users.

Twitter is ranked No. 13 in Alexa website rankings accounting for 3.9% of the global internet users.

WordPressis ranked No.17 in Alexa website rankings accounting for 3.8% of the global internet users.

Flickr is ranked No. 32 in Alexa website rankings accounting for 2.1% of the global internet users.

VKontakteis ranked No. 30 in Alexa website rankings accounting for 1.5% of the global internet users.

LinkedIn is ranked No. 50 in Alexa website rankings accounting for 1.3% of the global internet users.

Examples

Some of the biggest businesses today have gained popularity, success and customer loyalty by promoting themselves through the social media by employing creative and innovative marketing strategies.

One of the most popular examples is the series “Will it blend? “ created by George White, the marketing director of Blendtec that was featured on YouTube to point to the blending power of their blender by trying to blend an Apple iPhone3G.

Other popular businesses such as Starbucks, Burger King, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Zappos, Comcast, Ford, Graco and Dell too have successfully strategized their promotions by planning advertising campaigns on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Flickr and more. These sites have been successful not only in expanding their customer base, but also proving their market presence by adopting modern communication methodologies and protocols.