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Understand the power of social media marketing. To see how social media can be used as a marketing tool for your business. Social media marketing vs traditional marketing is the descript clear concept here. Even now that its marketing domination is clear, there are still professionals who treat social media advertising as a passing fad. To see whether social media and, therefore, social media marketing is just a fad or not, we need to answer these questions: 

 

• Do social media cover one or more human needs?
• Do people find them useful?

 

If social media don't meet any of our human needs, then they are indeed a passing fad. However, when we examine how people interact through and with the various social networks, we see that they satisfy our need for expression, and the need for communication with friends, as well as being updated on the latest news about everything. 

Another aspect of social media is that, in fact, they are not something new. They have been around since the dawn of the internet itself. You may think that Facebook is somewhat new, even though it went online in 2004, but its functions are not. Forums, chats, newsgroups, and bulletin boards all existed long before Facebook.

All Zuckerberg did was gather them under the same roof. With a few exceptions, we cannot say that Facebook has brought any real innovation to the internet. All the features which characterize Facebook and social media, in general, have been there for as long as the internet has existed. Product reviews, blog services, forums, newsgroups, video services, photo albums, and so much more.

They may not have had the same form as they have today, but their characteristics were exactly the same. What has happened is that they have improved as products and as services, they have become more user-friendly. And together with the expanding use of computers, the internet, and mobile phones, a large part of the population can now access them easily.

Facebook tends to be more of a complex communications platform, rather than a social network.

We can understand this better if we see that, in essence, it is a set of people interacting and communicating continuously with each other in various ways. I.e. a collection of digital functions that allow each of us to communicate with our circle of friends. Few people use Facebook as a means of making new acquaintances. Its main function is to keep us in touch with the people that we already know.

In order to understand the power of social media. 

we should examine their role within societies. To see how social media can be used as a marketing tool for your business, we must also consider the role of traditional media in our lives.

1. When was the last time you trusted an ad?
2. When was the last time you bought anything because you saw it in an ad?
3. How many of the ads that you saw today can you remember?

From the moment you wake up in the morning, until the moment you fall asleep at night, we see up to 3,000 advertising messages. Through the radio, SMS, printed on posters and flyers, on the streets or in metro carriages, and video screens in stores that you glanced at while waiting in a queue.

Updates during our ATM transactions, announcement office from the loudspeakers in the mall, and audio messages on our phone while waiting for a company representative to answer. Listings and newspapers and magazines, advertisements in cinemas, mobile phone ads, social media posts, and last but not least, TV advertising.

How do we interact with all these ads?

As a society, we pay no attention to them and tend automatically to reject every advertising message we receive.

Yet still, some of these messages will pass through and stick with us.

The ads we remember tend to have something that blows us away, to the extent that we cannot get them out of our heads. This is where social media may be useful. It's through social media that we can reach public interest or rather allow the public to come to us.

 

In order to understand the power of social media.

Content is what distinguishes social media apart from all conventional media. Whether it is content that is created by the users themselves (known as user-generated content), or by a company or an organization, everything revolves around it.

Although, as consumers, we turn a blind eye and close our ears to many advertisements, we do not do the same for information that is of interest to us. On the contrary, we do actively search for it. We read articles and books, watch videos, and study how-to guides.

Whether we are skaters, gardeners, or amateur musicians, we are constantly on the look for information about our hobbies and interests. Whether this information is for our hobbies or our work is irrelevant. What really matters is that we try to be up-to-date in our areas of interest and that we consider this information useful.

But what does this have to do with us, the marketers of a business?

And how does it relate to social media?

Well, because if we create content that is relevant to our target audience, then it is very easy to get in touch with the prospective buyers of our products or services.

This content is what will give us the edge over our competition. And social media is the channel through which we will make it accessible to the public.

Suppose you are a company that sells pastries.
Dough for pies, sweet doughs, dough for desserts.

 

• What would it cost you to make a marketing campaign for TV, radio, and newspapers?
• How many people would see it?
• And most importantly, how many people would be interested in it, and remember it after a few days?

Now, suppose that you want to do something more effective.

And rather than spend money on a campaign for TV, radio, or newspapers, you spend a much smaller amount to make a series of videos to distribute on social media.

Say you want to make some professional videos showing various recipes that users can make with your dough. Your product will then be the star of this video, which will present it in the best possible light.

So, let's assume that after recording these videos and editing them to perfection, you start to post them online. You create a YouTube and a Vimeo channel, as well as a Facebook page to engage users and upload additional information, and details about each recipe. After you do this, you also send emails to bloggers within the food and cuisine industry, in order to inform them about this educational video.

What will happen next in Social Media Marketing?

Every day, millions of people make countless searches on Google and other search engines, among other things, they look for recipes, such as a recipe for an apple pie or anything made with dough.

 

And guess what Google will show in its results?

Yes, you guessed correctly, your videos! 

Maybe not as the first or second result. Initially, at least. And certainly, not from day one, for sure. But they will indeed show up after some time. Gradually, people will begin to see these videos on the search engine results page. If users find them interesting and useful, they will seek other recipes that you have uploaded, and send these videos to their friends, who are also interested in cooking.

Perhaps, they will also publish them in their blog, or like and share your videos on Facebook. They will also like your Facebook page in order to see more videos when they come out. So, you've understood just how cost-effective social media can be, especially in comparison with conventional advertising.

And that they are also more meaningful and direct because our posts are reaching our specific target audience and not random people. Achieving this is not difficult. We simply need to create content having this particular audience in mind. Having done that, we only have to wait for them to come to us.

Isn't it much easier and more fruitful?

Doing so instead of trying to reach people who are not really interested in the issues we are writing about. Everything we publish must be created on the basis of how it can be useful, and how it may facilitate, inform, entertain, and teach our audience.

If we can integrate these objectives while also showcasing our product, then we have the perfect combination. Our main priority should be the readers of each article and their needs. The problems they face, and how we can help them easily solve these problems.

So, having understood how important it is to publish quality content, we start focusing there. But how will we know that we've created something remarkable or at least useful for our target audience?

Measuring Performance on Social Media.

It's very simple to see whether people like our articles. Every post we make on Facebook or elsewhere on social media, collects a number of comments, likes, shares, and, of course, clicks. Each of these metrics is very important in measuring whether readers find an article interesting or not.

Firstly, the comments made on each post-show whether people liked our post and why.

Moreover, comments may also help us get useful insights about future posts. Most of us comment on something that we either liked or hated or on topics that we want to share our opinion on. So, a small number of comments typically means that people find the article irrelevant to them. The likes that a post, photo, or video that we uploaded gets, speak for themselves. The more, the better.

However, if there is a measurement that really matters, it's the number of visits or views that an article has. The number, of course, does not say much on its own. Assuming that a recipe for apple pies is more popular than recipes for scrambled eggs with pastrami, we can expect that, all other things being equal, they will get more visits.

Same for a recipe that was posted a month ago when we had fewer followers. When we grow, our following and generate a larger audience it's likely that our latest posts will have more interactions and views than previous ones. So, what we shouldn't look at are the visits or views in isolation. What interests us is how many visits or views we get because people suggested our posts to their friends by sharing or posting them.

For a blog, it makes sense to examine the amount of direct traffic that each article has.

If all other things are equal, direct traffic to some posts is going up, we can therefore conclude that this increase comes from visitors who find it worthwhile to share these posts with their friends. You have created a wonderful TV or radio spot and it has been released on air. At the same time, you have published a full eight-page ad in a local magazine.

Excluding the amount you have spent, 

• what other information do you have about these listings?
• How many people actually listened to or watched your TV or radio ad?
• How many saw your magazine listing?

You may say that you know the ratings of a show and how many people read the magazine each month, and that by using these readings, you can make conclusions about how many people saw your advertisements.

Let us assume that the readings we have collected are accurate.

• Can we know how many people our message actually reached?
• How many viewers did not change the channel, went to the bathroom, or hastily turn the page?

Obviously, we can never know.

We can only make estimates hoping of being somewhat close to reality. The phrase "half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don't know which half" did not come about out of thin air. It fully characterizes advertising in conventional media. In social media, however, things are completely different. In social media, communication is not just free, it is also absolutely measurable. 

When we do a post on our Facebook page, unlike traditional methods of marketing, we know, at any given time, how many people have seen it. We also know how interesting users find our posts by examining how many likes, shares, and comments each of them gets. The same can be said for videos uploaded to YouTube or for articles posted on our blog.

Possibility Of Precise Measurements and Absolute Targeting.

Apart from the number of people who saw our post and the impact it had on them; we can also evaluate its effect on our business.

1. How many visitors have we had to our company site from posting a video on walls object versus another?
2. How many of these people had never visited our site before?
3. What was the number of page views per visit?
4. Did any of them buy anything from our shop?
5. If so, how many, and what was their total purchase amount?
6. What percentage of them subscribed to our newsletter?

But it is not only accurate metrics that give social media advantage over traditional media. Equally important for business is the accuracy with which we can target any audience. In the case of a TV spot, even if we knew how many people saw our advertisement, we would have no idea whether or not they found it even remotely interesting.

All of the social media.

however, things are completely different. Here, users search the content we have created themselves. Therefore, we know that they are interested in what they are viewing. So, since we are writing articles or recording videos with a specific target audience in mind, we can be pretty sure about the kind of people who are reading or watching them.

It is also fairly easy to find out whether these posts have a positive ROI. Let's say that writing 10 blog posts and bringing traffic to these cost 1,000 dollars. Let's also assume that the traffic that these posts have received until now is 10,000 visits. We can easily calculate that we paid 10 cents for each of these visits. What other advertising channel could give such an exact picture of the ROI of a campaign?

You can advertise all you want through social media and communicate with minimum costs to countless people, but you may still not achieve your marketing goals. You may see your efforts go to waste, and not gain anything because of the wrong mindset.

Instead of wondering what social media can do for your business, the only question that should concern you is what you can offer to your customers through social media?

How you can deliver content with value to the audience you're trying to reach?

Before writing or posting anything, ask yourself: Am I creating something text, article, guide, tutorial, video, podcast, informative website) that is actually interesting and helpful for my target audience?

Even if it doesn't have the slightest reference to my business. If the answer is yes, great. If not, do not proceed at all. Try to design it again, so that it will bring value regardless of whether it refers to your company or not. To avoid any misunderstanding, I'm not saying that the content you create and offer should not be branded. On the contrary, it should be branded and very much so.

But we must realize and keep in mind that the only people who are interested in our company are us. Nobody else. Our target audience is only interested in how to make their own lives easier, how to learn new things, how to reduce costs, and so on. Certainly, our customers don't really care about the prosperity of our business.

What we are offering should therefore not be promotional in any way. It must be made in such a way that even if, for example, a competitor copied it and substituted our logo for his, it could still be useful and noteworthy.

Many factors can undermine our social media efforts.

There are many factors that can undermine our social media efforts. The most dangerous though is the lack of transparency. We are strictly speaking. We're talking about your reputation, brand image, and product.

For example, trust, good relations with the public, reliability, etc., being severely damaged or destroyed by your company's lack of transparency.

Insufficient transparency is certain to create, at some point in time, a minor or major crisis. That may be a crisis from which your company may never be able to recover. If your company lacks transparency, the question is not whether a problem will arise but only when.

Take, for example, Walmart. Some years ago, an American couple decided to cross America with their van. Visiting all of the US and simultaneously recording their experiences in a blog. As they always stayed overnight in the parking lot of Walmart stores, they decided to name the blog "Wal-Marting Across America."

The blog proved popular with thousands of people who kept reading about their past travels from state to state. Everything was great for both the couple and Walmart until someone got curious about who was financing their road trip. With some digging, they found out that the trip was organized and funded by Walmart, which neither Walmart nor the couple had bothered to disclose.

As you can imagine, all the positive publicity that the company gained through the blog posts vanished and was replaced with negative comments. Even today, this is cited as a classic example of what to avoid when working with third parties to create content around your business. What you must always remember is that, if you get caught red-handed, you will not only lose all the good publicity that your campaign has created, but you will also damage your business reputation.

If one of our employees' comments on an article regarding our company or its products, She must always state her name and status within the company. If one of our clients or suppliers, albeit former, writes something about us in an article, they must disclose their relationship with our company.

If a blogger makes a presentation of one of our products, and that product has been given to him free of charge, he must make mention of this fact in his blog post. The same applies to anyone that we have ever worked with. This also extends to anyone who has a relationship with us, for example, relatives or friends. The fact that we ourselves cannot criticize a post that bashes our company, does not mean that our spouse or our daughter can.

At least not without indicating their relationship to us. If I had to summarize in a few words what the word transparency means, it would be that we are open, we have no secrets to fear, and whoever chooses to investigate us will not find anything that we would be ashamed of. 

Social Media Marketing is not Free

A major misconception about social media is that it is a free channel of communication and that all you need to do is to use it to send the world your message. Unfortunately, it is not so. It is indeed possible to create a Facebook page, a blog, or a YouTube channel at zero cost.

However, creating quality content costs money. If we add to that cost the countless man-hours of planning, community management, monitoring, and measurement of each post's success, we will realize that social media are far from cheap.