The Importance of Numbers in Social Marketing

Posted by admin at 26 March, at 09 : 39 AM Print

Content creation is a consistent commitment for any business that hopes to be valuable on the internet. Even if you have thousands of customers who visit your site every week, if they don’t see something new they’ll eventually stop visiting. Content Curation may be a constructive way to bridge the gap between expertise and lack of time to truly become an expert. However, there are other types, you describe, that appear to have measurable expertise ability.

Sites such as del.icio.us (bookmarking), LinkedIn (BtoB), and TripAdvisor (travel and hospitality), though visited by less than 10% of Internet users, nonetheless can serve as highly targeted, extremely effective means to reach very specific profiles of potential customers. Marketers should research their industry’s niches universe of social networking sites, and explore those offering this special targeting. Sites like Digg are notorious for their poor bounce rates: many visitors drop in for the article and then leave after reading it. StumbleUpon is much better in this aspect.

Facebook now rivals (and on certain days tops) Google as most visited site on the internet. MySpace, once the top social networking site for the 18-24 demographic, was rapidly trumped by Facebook. Facebook got in trouble for this when members weren’t given a chance to opt out of the Beacon feature that automatically made public any offsite purchases. Sue Aldrich, senior vice president at consulting firm the Patricia Seybold Group, recalls a similar situation when ordering plane tickets through online travel merchant Orbitz.

Online marketing is really gaining rapid popularity. To promote your site or product you have to do advertising so that people should know about it. Online metrics are an easy starting point, but as mentioned above can be misleading or meaningless. It’s important to establish an objective beyond just getting as many friends. Online marketing is always a smart choice. In a difficult economy, the importance of Internet marketing is even greater.

Twitter, Facebook, etc. are social networks where you need to get involved and stay involved. By being involved and thinking clearly about how a managed program will evolve and play out, you not only benefit from the program itself, but you set in place the basis for a true community built around your brand and the larger experiences you provide as your overall social media program continues to expand. Twitter themselves finally publish numbers indicating there are 50mm tweets created each day. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day.

Companies often forget the lead generating opportunities that social media tools like Facebook have to offer. One things that B2B companies should keep in mind to increase lead generation on Facebook is to be sure to have links to the company resources that they already have such as email subscriptions, newsletters, white papers, brochures, etc. Companies are already well-versed in monitoring traditional media outlets for mentions of their brand. While print publications and broadcast outlets still carry significant credibility, so do the millions of individual brand ambassadors who discuss companies, brands, products and services through social media channels such as blogs, forums, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Foursquare, etc. Companies need to continue marketing research to manage this uncertainty. How will marketing research benefit your company?

Personally, I have seen people increase their marketing dollars in the social media realm of their businesses ten-fold already (and that’s just since October 2009)! The more you promote it, the more they will come – isn’t that the truth with social media too!? Personally I would target both broad and narrow-focus channels for any website I own.

Addition in Twitter Lists and how the follower uses a Twitter client tell a much stronger story. Additionally, the CDC found that achieving behavioral changes required very high levels of awareness, which are difficult to achieve without substantial investment. It is also difficult to measure behavioral change when competing trends or “noise” from other interventions can cloud the findings.

Learn to engage and get results. Learning is part of the game, so in creating videos you might find yourself uncomfortable to start, but you never have to start again. Some find it easier to start with dong screen captures, and then move to full motion. Learn how easy it is for your market to get your message. Nowadays, if you’re not tweeting, Facebooking, or blogging, what are you doing? Everyone has a Twitter account, a Facebook page, or a blog, even celebrities! Get started today!

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