Social Media marketing

    In This chapter you will learn about

●    Social Media Marketing for Businesses 

●    what is Social Media Marketing 

●    Start With a Plan

●    Developing your Goals

●   How to Use Social Media for Marketing:         Know your Platform 

Social Media Marketing for Businesses:

Using Social media for marketing can enable small business looking to further their reach to more customers. Your customers are interacting with brands through social media, therefore, having a strong social media marketing plan and presence on the web is key to tap into their interest. If implemented correctly, marketing with social media can bring remarkable success to your business. 

What is Social Media Marketing?:

Social media marketing, or SMM, is a form of internet marketing that implements vairous social media networks in order to achieve marketing communication and branding goals. Social media marketing primarily covers activities involving social sharing of content, videos, and images for marketing purposes, as well aa paid social media advertising. 

We've created this guide to provide you with the social media marketing tips and training you need to better your business. We want to give small businesses on short budgets an alternative to hiring a social media marketing agency or paying for social media marketing services. 

Social Media and Marketing: Start With a Plan:

Before you begin creating social media marketing campaigns consider your business goals. Starting a social media marketing campaign without a social strategy in mind is like wandering through a forest without a map- you'll  only end up lost. 

Create a social media marketing plan and brainstorm about your goals: what are you hoping to achieve through social media marketing? Who is your target audience? Where would your target audience hang out and how would they use social media?

What message do you want to send to your audience with social media marketing?

Social Media for Marketing: Developing your Goals:

Social media marketing can help with a number of goals, such as:

●     Increasing website traffic 

●     Building conversions

●     Raising brand awareness 

●    Creating a brand identity and                         positive brand association

●    Improving communication and                         interaction with key audience 

Only be establishing your goals can you measure your social media ROI.

How to Use Social Media for Marketing: Know Your Platform:

The default position for social media marketing seems to be Facebook. While Facebook is undeniably important, let's stack it up to the other platforms in the context of our ultimate goal of building an actionble audience.

If you were to draw an arrow from the lower left quadrant (low time required, low audience ownership) to the upper right quadrant (high time required and high audience ownership), it would also present a useful continuum of the less complex content to more complex content requirements. Let's look at each platform starting roughly from the lower left to the upper right.

Meerkat/Periscope: streaming video is hot right now but at this point the genre is limited in its ability to attain reliable reach. You can stream live from an event or from your home but it has a limited opportunity for sustaining an audience beacuse who you reach is  dependent on who is available in that moment. 

But keep your eye on this space.  I think over time, these Platforms will improve in their ability to create reliable reach as  figure out creative new uese for regularly scheduled programming and even integrating with traditional media. Of all the platforms listed here, I think this one has the most potential to shift to the upper right in terms of sustaining an actionble audience. 

Yahoo Answers: A lot of people still love to visit old school forums and Q&A sites like Yahoo  Answers. Recent research from Edison suggests that more people visit forums than blogs. However a fourm is somewhat limited in creating a sustainable and actionble audience. You might answer questions for an entirely new audience each time you visit the site. In this case, Yahoo really owns the audience, not you.

Twitter: is not as simple as it might appear. Although you are limited to 140 characters, it can be quite difficult creating something meaningful in that small space. Twitter stands alone in its ability to create a huge, relevant audience quickly, but since you cannot target groups of followers with messages (at least yet,) it sometimes feels like you are throwing a message out to a big silent world. The Platform is great at making initial connections which can lead to reliable reach on another platform like a blog or podcast. 

Instagram: One of the reasons this platform is so popular is that it is so easy to use. Snap a photo and post. This is one of the reasons that Instagram is used at work more than any other platform ( 85% of its users do so!). In fact it is probably unique among platforms  in its opportunity to create connection with relatively little work. Another advantage is that there is no timeline editing. Every subscriber has an equal chance of seeing what you post. But like Twitter, your content is somewhat ephemeral as it slowly sinks to the bottom of the news feed.

Pinterest: Is the only platform in the box of " low work, high reach." Primarily,  you are creating audience value by curating content (rather than creating content) from other sources on the wwb into logical pages that will inspire and entertain. And if you do an excellent job with curating, you can build a very loyal audience.  One sign of the platforms ability to create an active audience is that pinned items drive more web traffic than any other platform. 

Google+: Is the most mysterious of all the platforms. Is it vital and vibrant? Or is it a desolate ghost town? The answer is both. Deposit the cries of its stalwart defenders, Google+ is simply not a mainstream public platform. Most people simply don't care about the SEO benefits. It's never mentioned on TV, you don't see businesses asking for a follow on G+, and it's not on the radar screen of Millennials. So your access to mainstream consumers is extremely limited. 

However G+ is nearly unparalleled in its ability to create passionate communities of fans who really around a cause a subject or a person. There are wonderful communities dedicated to photography, cars,and tech,for example. You can certainly build an actionble audience on G+ but the platform trends toward the left on the chart beacuse of its limited scope.

Facebook: Is like a gambling addiction. You keep putting more and more money into it beacuse the idea of a huge payoff is so intoxicating. You can't ignore Facebook. It's huge and popular but in many ways,it's the most difficult platform to navigate. 

●  To really succeed, you must be a                      conventional brand, or become one (not        easy or cheap)

●  It takes a lot of money and effort to build an audience but then Facebook keeps you away from them. Facebook severely limits access to your audience.  Read this post on the decline in Facebook organic reach to learn more about that.

●  while Facebook seems simple and freel it's not. To get your content on to a timeline, you probably need to spenda lot on quality, promotion, or both.

Reddit: Hosts an unparalleled number of content-centric communities. It's kind of a combination of Google+, Forums, and blogging. Like G+, people are passionate about the platform and their communities.Like forums, people will go to great lengths to help each other, and like blogging there is an emphasis on thought-provoking original content. There are Reddit communities for almost any topic but forget about promoting your local pizza business. Any form of commercial display is likely to get you kicked out.

LinkedIn: A year ago LinkedIn would have been down low in the low work low audience block with Twitter. Sure it's a great place to look for a job but there just was not much socialization going on there. That  has all changed with its new emphasis on publishing. Now any member can use LinkedIn as a blogging fourm and tap into the potential exposure of LinkedIn's vast audience.

For those who have not been able to patiently build a dedicated blog community this is an amazing opportunity and score of people are finally finding an audience for their work. The main limitation is that this is a business site. You probably aren't going to publish about your favorite sports team or restaurant unless there is a business lesson behind it. And of course ultimately LinkedIn still owns the audience. 

Snapchat: You might be thinking that I have this in the wrong place on this chart. How hard could it be to create content for Snapchat? You just post photos right? And doesn't Snapchat offer among the most engaged and passionate users?

You would be right on both counts. However I am writing this from the perspective of corporate marketing success. Let me give you an example of how difficult this platform is to master. 

Disney recently hired well-known Snapchat artists to create snaps throughout their park over a 24 hour period. It was a great success and Disney garnered 50,000 new followers from the stunt . So the first lesson is that it takes some effort  to attract new followers. The second lesson is the art created for this program was not easy, not cheap, and it lested just few moments never to be re purposes again. The final point is now what once Disney had the new followers how are they going to keep that edgy Millennials art going to sustain the gains Snapchat is fun and easy unless you're a brand marketer. 

Slideshare: I wrote a blog post it was viewed 7,000 times.  I turned it into a Slideshare presentation . It was viewed 110,000 times. Any questions? Slideshare has the potential for incredible reach to an entirely new audience. But it is also very difficult to be successful beacuse there is a certain art involved in telling a compelling visual story through slides. You need the content, the images, the great story. It can't be too short it can't be too long. You can't really DIY it on the graphics.and the Slideshare audience is still limited, by far the smallest platform covered here which is why audience ownership is limited. Only 15 percent of marketers are actively using it.

Still  it is growing owend by LinkedIn,  and highly indexed by Google.  If you put in the work there is lots of opportunity to build a presence that leads to an actionble community especially if your competitors aren't there yet.

Blogging, Podcasting,  and Video: I am grouping these three titans in the upper right corner beacuse they are all similar and distinctive in their importance. The opportunities for these three platforms:

●   You generally must create original,  distinctive content to stand out. Not easy. Not cheap.

●    The opportunity for reliable reach is unprecedented beacuse people subscribe to your content.  In other words, not only do they consumers it, they expect it.

●    Consistently published a blog, video series, or podcast allows you develop important, loyal connections over time. These are people specifically interested in you and they are actionble. 

●    There are virtually no limitations to the type of audience you can reach. 

●     You own are virtually no limitations to the type of audience you can years.

●    This represents a proprietary audience accessible by you.

  Under certain circumstances you can build a relevant actionble passionate audience on any of these social media platforms. However for most businesses, the engine for social media success begins with the rich content provided by a blog video series orPodcast . An investment in this content also provides an opportunity for massive exposure compared to a simple tweet of Facebook post.