With so many advertising avenues to pursue, how does an organization choose what is best for them? Traditional advertising such as print, radio, and television ad campaigns have worked well for decades, but in the technological world we are living in, our options have expanded to include social media marketing. There are ways to engage your users, generate traffic, and increase exposure all through sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Social media marketing is defined by Wikipedia as “the use of social networks, online communities, blogs, wikis or any other online collaborative media for marketing, sales, public relations and customer service.” According to a recent survey, Facebook is at the forefront of the social media marketing revolution with 61% of experienced marketers stating this site as the most effective social media site.
More experienced marketers are turning to social media outlets to generate revenues for four main reasons: time, money, networking, and activity. Traditional marketing campaigns take excessive amounts of time and money to launch, whereas marketing on Facebook or Twitter is free and requires a much smaller time commitment. By making relevant daily or weekly posts, you can generate traffic to your site, increasing your exposure. Running short on ideas for posts? Creating an alert through Google allows you to receive via email the top results of a specific search term on a regular basis. This can help generate ideas as well as keep you abreast of the current trends in your industry.
Online networking benefits are phenomenal. In the days before the Internet, businessmen and women had to schedule face-to-face time with their clients and prospects. While this is a great way to create strong business relationships, the truth is that we live in a societal time crunch. Most of us, even those who are great at managing our time and resources, could still use more hours in the day to get everything accomplished. Networking online allows us to find our friends, clients, and prospects in a shorter amount of time with the added benefit of mobility. Networking doesn’t have to take place during normal work hours, but can be completed from your mobile phone or at home, if necessary. LinkedIn is a great professional networking site, boasting 100 million experienced professionals from around the world representing over 130 industries.
Traditional marketing generally has a campaign timeframe, whereas social media marketing campaigns can go on for months or even years with relatively little maintenance. Creating a campaign and generating activity amongst your users can sometimes fuel itself with posts and comments. Providing your audience with a great topic and allowing them to respond generates the activity you are looking for as well as user engagement.
Though traditional marketing still has its place, social media marketing is here to stay. There will be more of a shift to these less traditional means in the years to come, saving organizations time and money while still accomplishing marketing objectives.
