Creating a Social Media Marketing Plan

Advanced Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

Social media marketing and the businesses that utilize it have become more sophisticated. More small businesses are beginning to understand how to best leverage online tools to build a community and recognize that engagement and interaction are the foundations of social marketing, but most don’t know what’s next.

What follows are five advanced strategies for small businesses that may already have small online communities and understand how to create an online presence, but don’t know what to do next.

What Is An Advanced Strategy?

The definition of an advanced social strategy is a technique that goes beyond the normal social media presence. It introduces or reinforces a marketing message while pushing a user to another profile or business site. Before moving forward with an advanced strategy, it’s important that your business understands social marketing, has experience engaging consumers, and that you possess a basic understanding of online marketing.

Strategy 1: Multimedia Usage

The term “A picture is worth a thousand words” has never been truer. Consumers are now using the web to look for product pictures and videos; they want more information and want to see what they’re considering buying. The good news is that it’s easy for a company to create and publish videos and pictures.

In addition to taking photos of products, you can also take pictures at office events as a way to highlight company culture. This not only helps convince others to work with you or to buy from you (consumers see that you are down to earth and one of them, instead of a stuffy company), it also helps your HR department recruit new employees. Who doesn’t want to work for a company that celebrates birthdays and has a good time?

Videos are useful for explaining complex how-tos or concepts. Showing step by step directions can have a greater impact than even the most well written article. Businesses don’t have to invest huge sums of money to create good videos, either. I highly recommend the relatively cheap Flip camcorder, which takes great videos and is easy for even a non-technical marketer to use.

Multimedia can break down the faceless business-to-consumer sales flow and make your company appear friendlier. Use videos and images to show that your business is fun, you care about your employees, and most importantly, that you care about your customers.

Example: WorldMusicSupply.com

WorldMusicSupply.com, an online retailer of musical instruments and accessories, has used YouTube to build a strong online community. Their channel has built over 7,000 subscribers and has over 260,000 views.

Strategy 2: Integrate Offline and Online Advertising

Many small businesses do some sort of offline advertising, whether it be radio, print, or cable. Social marketing allows a business to extend their offline sales pitch.

Including your Facebook Page or blog URL in offline ads act as social proof, inviting potential consumers to see your community and increase trust in your business. Not only can integrating online and offline advertising help the conversion process, but it can also help build your community. Introducing potential consumers to your social profiles means they may join your community now and buy later.

Strategy 3: Message Adaptation

As businesses start to become more sophisticated with social media they are starting to leverage more online platforms. However, most deliver the same message over multiple platforms instead of tailoring communications for each individual site.

Social platforms each have an ecosystem of their own. What might be acceptable on Tumblr might be considered spam on Facebook. A specific style of writing might spread on Twitter but fail on FriendFeed. Understanding that each site is different and then customizing your message ensures they do well on each respective site.

Not only does customizing messages across sites help the message spread but it keeps users from receiving multiple identical communications. Be sure to maximize your potential by sending a user that follows the business on Twitter and Facebook two different messages, instead of the same thing.

Strategy 4: Local Social Networks, Beyond Yelp

For a small business, local search can be a big win. Being visible to consumers looking for a business in their area is extremely important. Make sure your site is included in local business directories in order to help ensure that consumers find you when they need you. Sometimes finding many sites can be difficult.

First, make sure you check your competitors. Where are they listed? Check their inbound links to check for business directories you can add yourself to. Also, make sure your business has been added to Google Maps, using the Local Business Center.

Take the time to include all the information you can and update any old news. For many consumers, this will be their first interaction with the business.

Example: Bella Napoli in New York

Bella Napoli is a small pizzeria in New York that has done a great job of making sure they appear in as many local searches as possible.

Strategy 5: Contests and Discounts

Building a community is only the first part of social marketing. Using that community to drive sales, propagate marketing, or crowdsource operations is the true power of social media. One way to excite the community is to collectively do something to create a contest or offer an exclusive discount (i.e., the contest can create competition between users). Not only does a contest build buzz organically but if contestants need to, for example, publish an article that gets the most comments in order to win, the contest itself becomes viral.

A good social media contest should include some sort of sharing or virality as a requirement for winning.

Discounts are also a great way to connect with your community. By giving exclusive coupons to your social community, you’re rewarding and reminding them that you are not only a brand to engage with, but also to buy from.

Example: NetFirms.com

NetFirms.com decided to make it easier to register a domain by allowing people to do it via Twitter. Those who participated or spread the word by tweeting were also entered into a prize drawing.

Conclusion

Creating a basic social media presence is easy enough, getting your community to actually do something is more difficult. Taking advantage of these strategies can help you build your community, make your marketing more effective, and incentivize buying.

Source: mashable.com

Social Media Marketing Trends

Social media marketing disappears

Social media is going to be integral part of everything we do when promoting our business. This will make social media an integral part of marketing and it will not be a separate activity. Much like SEO or email marketing, social media will be just one tool in the box.

Integrating social media to corporate websites

Brands start large scale integration of social media content into their digital properties. Big brands will use social media connect and user generated content to get closer to customers. This will help them get most out of true fans and brand advocates by linking their web properties to conversations.

More support through social media

The integration of social media will lead to people reporting their problems in their channel of choice. Social media integration lets some of those problems be handled by the peers. However, companies should find ways to avoid their social media channels becoming a glorified helpdesk.

Social CRM will make inroads in larger organizations

Social data will be added to the CRM systems to find trends in sentiment and individual preferences of customers. The goal is to engage the customer in a conversation and give value that binds them tighter to the brand. As brands lose control of online interaction social CRM will help them react and predict how conversations are taking place. Findings from IBM showed that in the next three to five years, 81% plan to focus on customer analytics and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.

Social media will influence more sales

Social media integration will allow customers to get real user opinions before making purchase decisions. Social commerce is not web shop on Facebook. It’s a digital property where people can make their decision based on marketing materials from the brand and augmented with feedback from existing customers in a form of ratings, reviews and comments.

Social commerce on mobile devices

We will lead into a new era in eCommerce where you can directly purchase from your Facebook account. With proliferation of mobile platforms social commerce will become popular on mobile devices. Facebook’s Open Graph will also let you directly purchase with Facebook credits based on recommendations by your friends.

Social media budgets will grow

Most companies will increase their social media budgets. This includes in-house spending on and outsourced services and part of the investments go to boost their own social presence through blogs and product reviews. Rest goes to external sites like Facebook.

Social media advertising will grow

Social media channels are looking to turn a profit so they are looking for ways to get at your advertising budget. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others are looking into way to display more marketing messages to their users. This will increase budgets dedicated to social media advertising.

Social media advertising will grow to $5 Billion in 2012, 25% of that vill be locally targeted social advertising.

Social media ROI is a must

More result oriented. Still less than half of the marketer’s measure results from social media. Social media ROI is a hot topic but less than half of the marketers report seeing it. We see that the budgets will grow and social gets more important in the brand’s marketing mix. This means that C-level will demand results. Dollars in sales - It can be as easy as direct sales from Facebook or a bit more vague as in conversion rate of people from social channels is higher than average.

In the course of our conversations with CMOs worldwide, an overwhelming consensus emerged. The vast majority of CMOs believe there are three key areas for improvement. They must understand and deliver value to empowered customers; create lasting relationships with those customers; and measure marketing’s contribution to the business in relevant, quantifiable terms.

Rise of the branded content

Next to advertising there will be a push be in the user’s stream. This means brands need to create content that is good enough to be curetted and shared. Content has longer shelf life, can be reused in different channels, and has higher perceived value for customers. This means that content creation budgets may in many cases exceed the social advertising budgets. It wouldn’t be surprising if some brands will kill advertising in favor of content creation.

Content Curation and Discovery

Information explosion has created an attention deficit and people want to have a quick overview of what’s important and easily find what they need. Aggregation and content curation are going to be very important and brands start filtering information to give value to their customers. Brands will integrate curation into their IT or use third party services. News aggregation apps like Flipboard and magazine apps will find a market in corporate circles.

Tabletizing and mobilizing websites

Not exactly a social media thing but businesses start to make their sites mobile. Like 10 years ago companies made websites because everybody else did; now they will make their sites mobile because everybody else does. People will use more social networks’ messaging instead of regular email and IM. (Webmail providers should be worried).

Social gaming will grow and spill over to real world

Social Media Games have more players than prime time TV shows have viewers. In-game ads and branded game items will become important promotional tools. As social media will become more mobile so will social gaming. This means that games that are hosted on social networks, such as Zynga and EA on Facebook, will be playable on mobile devices. 

These kinds of games will be played on-the-go – when you’re traveling by bus, sitting in a boring lecture, waiting for your lunch. Social gaming will be integrated with real life to physically perform tasks offline that have effect in the virtual world. Engage real friends; go to locations, flash mobs, etc. The potential growth of mobile social gaming will be huge.

Location! Location! Location!

Location based services will be everywhere. The Local information, reviews, coupons, loyalty programs and more all tied in with your social graph. We are moving towards an era of real-time need for information. More and more people will be checking for recommendations about nearby restaurants, bars, hotels, etc. Location based services will be part of many marketing campaigns. Near-field communication chips in mobile devices get more common and will pave the way to the new era of “tap & pay” commerce. Loyalty programs will start moving towards NFC and location based solutions. NFC will be a convenient way for you to connect, share and react.

Most social media usage will be on mobile devices

Social media is happening in real time and people share content when it’s happening! As smart phone penetrations reaches majority and tablets become increasingly popular, sharing content will move towards mobile devices. Smart phones give us extra depth into personalization – we can share what we want, when we want. The limits are fading! You will always be connected with social media, no matter where you are!

Group buying sites will add location based services

Let’s face it, it is a brain dead model. Grow a huge list by offering really cheap deals and then sell that list to businesses to get really cheap deals. Group buying will not go away but businesses will understand better what it is and use it accordingly. To spell it out: businesses buy an opportunity to let potential customers sample their offering at a hugely discounted rate in hopes of repeat business. New layer of value can be added by integrating with location based services that will alert users to deals when they are in the neighborhood.

Interacting with live TV in social media

Live TV shows will react to user interactions such as votes, suggestions, etc. We have the ability to change what’s happening by providing real-time feedback on social networks. TV is going to be everywhere through mobile apps.

News will be social

News websites will gradually be replaced by applications integrated with social media technology such as Facebook’s Open Graph. While this won’t happen instantly, we’re going down that road as we speak. People will be reading news from their dedicated applications such as iPad’s Flipboard or Washington Post Social Reader.

Mobile apps will become more social

All of the successful new mobile apps will be deeply integrated with social networks allowing you to share and engage more than ever before. We will be taking in a lot of suggestions and recommendations from our friends, colleagues and other trustworthy peers.

Your social media footprint will grow

Frictionless sharing capabilities and social gestures will make our lives increasingly visible on social networking sites. Music, TV shows, check-ins, purchases and more will be automatically posted to social media sites. Always connected, always sharing! If you don’t share, your friends will. Some may raise privacy concerns but most people will ignore the implications and their lives are going to be more open than ever before.

Facebook will break the 1 Billion people mark

Where do those more than 1 billion Facebook users come from? The countries with more than 20 million people and Facebook penetration below 20% will add most of this growth in 2012. Add the potential growth of other countries and you get to a cool billion or 1.1 billion even. And that does not include China.

Source: www.dreamgrow.com

How To Measure Your Organization’s Social Media Success

Your organization or business knows that it’s important to measure the progress you’re making with your social media program or campaign, but what do you measure, why and how?

There’s no single, simple answer, but today we’ll offer a framework to guide you through the thicket of differing approaches you should consider before implementing a metrics program. (If you have other approaches that have worked for you, please add them to the comments!)

Creating goals to advance your mission

First off, don’t obsess about metrics. In fact, forget about the data altogether. What you’re really trying to do is advance your organization’s mission. Metrics are just a tool to help you do that.

Before assigning someone on your staff to take ownership of metrics, ask yourself: What are the key items we need to track to determine if we’re moving the needle? Have I clearly formulated a set of goals to advance my organization’s strategic or business objectives? Once you have a set of goals in place, then, and only then, should you begin considering which tools to use for your measurements.

Start by listing a series of specific, concrete, short-term, measurable, achievable goals that advance your long-term mission. Most of these goals should be short-term and modest in scope. Your organization may want to:

• Grow traffic to your website or blog
• Grow your newsletter list
• Motivate people to donate
• Move people to take a specific action, like signing a petition
• Turn supporters into volunteers
• Increase sale of a product or service
• Build visibility and authority for your brand or cause
• Solicit micro-loans
• Boost your following on Twitter or Facebook
• Spur people to register to attend an event
• Reduce operational costs by crowd sourcing tasks
• Test the efficacy of one donation button vs. another
• Enhance your site’s search engine rankings
• Increase the number of blog comments people post
• Reduce your site’s bounce rate (and increase stickiness)

All of these goals can — and should — be measured. And you’ll notice that while social media will be used to pursue and measure your progress in achieving many of these goals, others don’t involve social media at all. That’s OK. Social media should fold into your overall metrics program, not the other way around.

KPIs: How you’ll measure progress

Now that you have a list of goals, you’ll want to map them to Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs. A KPI is simply a metric that you track to assess whether you are accomplishing your business goals. There are literally hundreds of KPIs that you could be tracking in a spreadsheet, but your team will want to identify only a handful that matter most — the ones that will specifically help you achieve your goals.

For instance, if you want to grow your list of supporters, you’ll be able to measure the number of newsletter or RSS subscribers. If you want more interactivity on your blog, you can measure the average number of comments that people post.

Following is a partial list of KPIs/social interaction metrics

• Blog comments
• Downloads
• Email subscriptions
• Likes or Fans
• Favorites (add an item to favorites)
• Followers (follow something / someone)
• Forward to a friend
• Groups (create / join / total number of groups / group activity)
• Install widget (on a blog page, Facebook, etc.)
• Personalization (pages, display, theme)
• Ratings
• Registered users (new / total / active / dormant / churn)
• Reviews
• Time spent on key pages
• Uploads (add an item, e.g. articles, links, images, videos)

There are dozens more, but you get the idea. Some of these social interactions may map to multiple goals. Last year the Interactive Advertising Bureau released a document detailing social media metrics and definitions.

Get strategic: Determine formulas for calculating success

We know of a lot of nonprofits and companies that simply maintain a spreadsheet, check it occasionally to see if the numbers are trending in the right direction and pay little heed to what they could be learning if they dug a little deeper. That’s what the rest of this article is about.

In an April 2010 whitepaper by Web Analytics Demystified and the Altimeter Group, the authors propose aligning KPIs to social business objectives and offer formulas for calculating success.

They set out a simple framework of four Social Business Objectives and associated KPIs:

• Foster dialogue: Share of Voice, Audience Engagement, Conversation Reach
• Promote advocacy: Active Advocates, Advocate influence, Advocate Impact
• Facilitate support: Resolution Rate, Resolution Time, Satisfaction Score
• Spur innovation: Topic Trends, Sentiment Ratio, Idea Impact

How to measure: Yes, social media can be quantified

You may have heard the cliché that social media can’t be measured. Let’s bust that myth. Here are some practical metrics methodologies to get you on your way:

Super Six Steps to Measurement

• Set your objectives
• Define your stakeholders
• Determine which metrics to use
• Benchmark against yourself over time or your competition
• Pick your measurement tool/technology
• Analyze the results and start over

Don’t overlook keyword search

Finally, don’t forget keyword search! It’s one of the key components of search marketing and should be a part of any metrics program you undertake. By analyzing your site and social media accounts for key words and phrases, you’ll be able to correct bad keyword choices and begin to drive more traffic from people searching for information about your cause or sector.

Source: www.socialbrite.org

Free Tools To Measure Social Media

Below are the 14 free tools to measure social media influence on the World Wide Web. 

SEMRush: What does your site rank for?

Just plunk your blog or website URL into the search field a top of the page and SEMRush will show the keywords it ranks highest for. SEMRush will show you what you rank for, what your competitors rank for, what Google AdWords you might consider buying and the terms you should be focusing on in your blog posts.

Woopra: How are your visitors behaving?

We like what we’ve seen of Woopra, a Web analytics tool that provides real-time data about how users are interacting with your site. While the visitor moves through your site, you can see where she came from, her approximate location, and the actions she performs and where she goes off to next. Woopra has a freemium model: While the free version of Woopra is severely limited, you may soon want to move up to the Bronze ($4.95 per month) or Silver edition ($14.95 per month), which let you segment your visitors (say, referrals from Facebook, Twitter or StumbleUpon), print out customized reports and track trends over time. Like SEMRush, Woopra helps you get your own house in order before moving on to your outposts on the social Web.

Klout: Scoring across three networks

Klout offers a daily summary of your organization’s or team members’ social media influence, with a ranking that factors in your reach and impact on Twitter (metrics such as re-tweets, follower counts, list memberships, and unique mentions), Facebook and LinkedIn. Klout has an open API that’s integrated into many Twitter apps: More than 750 partners use Klout data, including Hootsuite, CoTweet and Attensity 360. For the end user, its analytics platform is rich and easy to use, even if the methodology used in spitting out a Klout Score is a bit opaque.

Facebook Insights: Stats you can use

Facebook beefed up its Insights service this year, to good effect. Now Facebook Insights resembles Google Analytics in many ways. As a Page admin, your dashboard gives you access to a trove of data: daily active users, monthly active users, daily new likes, and daily interactions such as comments, geographic location of your visitors (broken down by country, city and language), external referrals, internal link traffic and more. When you have spikes of user engagement, Insights will show you caused them. It’ll show you what content most interests your readers, and it’ll let you and your team understand and analyze growth trends. One big limitation is that you can’t access a lot of the data older than a week.

Bit.ly: Are your promotions working?

Our favorite URL shortener, bit.ly, provides double duty by offering analytics and click data for every link shortened. Click data lets you see how effective your social media promotions are. Nothing much, just log into account to see click through numbers. A new feature, bundles, lets you group similar links together. Both the free version of bit.ly and Bit.ly Pro handle our metrics needs without the need to upgrade to Enterprise ($995 per month).

TubeMogul: Who’s watching your videos?

If you’re familiar with TubeMogul, you probably think of it simply as a way to upload your videos to multiple sites, saving you the hassle of uploading videos over and over. But TubeMogul has developed a rich set of metrics lately, letting you see stats on how many people have watched your videos across networks. Real-time analytics include views, viewed minutes, audience geography, embeds, referring sites and search terms and more, all via your dashboard. It helps us to cross-compare by category, content delivery network, advertising mix or video player. And it’s free!

YouTube Insight: What parts of your video are ‘hot’?

YouTube Insight is a self-service analytics and reporting tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the audience for the videos that you upload to the site. Use the information to analyze marketing your efforts — both on and off YouTube — and determine how best to optimize your campaigns. Watch the video (natch) and see metrics around views and popularity, how people get to your site, the content clicked on, average pages per visit, which parts of your video are “hot” and “cold,” demographic information and community engagement.

Google Analytics: Powerful & easy to use

Google Analytics has become such an indispensable part of the analytics landscape that it’s not surprising we get a little blasé about it. But let’s not forget the genius of this tool: You get super-rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness — for free. Create better-targeted ads, track sales and conversions, measure your site engagement goals, track Web-enabled phones and mobile apps, integrate business info and develop applications that access Google Analytics data.

Alexa & Compete: How do you stack up?

When was the last time you looked to see how your site or blog was doing over time? Google Analytics will provide traffic data more accurately than analytics services like Compete, Quantcast and Alexa, but these firms also show trends, a different set of demographics guesswork and, most pointedly, how your site measures up against your competitors’. Alexa offers search analytics showing the top queries driving traffic to your site from search engines.

Feedburner: Are your feeds radiating out?

Now owned by Google, Feedburner is the easiest way to roll your own feed — and then sit back and watch the stats roll it. It’ll tell you how many people have subscribed to your blog or site — or even a section of your blog, if you set it up that way. Dig deeper and you’ll find your Feed Stats Dashboard, revealing average subscribers, reach, popular feed items (recently and all time) and other interesting factoids. For instance, we didn’t know Cambridge (Mass.) Community Television was aggregating Socialbrite’s open content via our feeds until we spotted it in Feedburner.

Twitter tools! A wealth of options

There are a ton of third-party Twitter apps to measure your Twitter grandiosity. Here are a few of my favorites:
Twitalyzer works for any Twitter account and gives you information about their impact score (percentile score) and the type of influencer they are.
Grader.com is a suite of tools that helps you measure and analyze your marketing efforts. It shows the bio, location, history and the number of followers of the Twitter user you’re researching, and more.
Twittercounter lets you count registrations and comments on a particular campaign you’re running.
Backtweets shows you how many people you reach on Twitter and helps you understand how people interact with your brand and your content.
Type your Twitter ID into Twitterholic (where you can also see the most popular Twitter users in your city) or Twinfluence or Twittorati to see what kind of impact you’re making.
How far did your tweet travel? tweetreach offers reach metrics, statistics and analysis for marketing and PR professionals. Retweetrank, Tweetmeme, Twitturly and Retweetist also measure how often you get retweeted.
Tweeteffect determines which tweets make you lose or gain followers.
My Tweeple is a basic tool that lets you manage who you’re following and who’s following you.
Twittersheep analyzes your follower profiles to assess their likelihood of engagement.
Plus, a whole lot of other Twitter analytics apps.

PostRank: A modest tracking dashboard

PostRank provides detailed information on Tweets, stumbles, Diggs and FriendFeed all in one place. It’s suited to blogs and websites with a lot of content. Under its free plan, you can Track and compare your sites and your competition — up to five sites in all — to get the full picture of your social engagement. You can also track your static and offsite content (PDFs, YouTube videos, SlideShare content) for up to 10 sites.

Flickr: Are your pictures trending?

Flickr was one of the earliest social networks to provide metrics about how many people are viewing your photos. For instance, you’ll be able to see such statistics as views for your photos, sets and galleries — today, yesterday and all time (3.4 million for me, how about you?) — Your most viewed photos and videos and how many have been geo tagged or have comments. I just wish Flickr would tell you how many people are embedding your photos on their sites.

Soovox: For brand lovers

Soovox has a slightly different take on the Klout model: Discover your Social IQ, share your likes and earn rewards. Your “social influence quotient” measures your online social presence footprint and assigns it a value that gets translated into rewards. The money you make can go to your organization or to your favorite charity. Soovox is more geared to individuals who like to share their opinions about brands and products they love, but it’s worth a look.

Other tools - A worth look

Here are some other metrics tools we like. Not all of them are free:

Seoquake is a powerful tool for Mozilla Firefox, aimed at helping web publishers who deal with search engine optimization and Internet promotion of websites. Seoquake allows users to assess important SEO parameters of an Internet project on the fly.

Social Report offers a social network performance tracking, monitoring and reporting tool. It comes with a 30-day trial and prices starting at just $9/month.

Foursquare and Yelp provides business dashboards that have the ability to review check-in data and other metrics.

Technorati and BlogPulse are blog search engines. Look for metrics around bloggers’ influence and authority.

Google Trends provides information on Web search trends around key terms and topics. It shows how often your topics have appeared in Google News stories and in which geographic region people have searched for them the most.

Xinureturns provides a dashboard overview of your site’s standing in social media. Run a report and you’ll receive information on Technorati, Googe PageRank, Diggs and even backlinks to your website.

Tribe Monitor is a social statistics aggregator that helps yo keep track of your fan base on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and more.

Source: www.socialbrite.org

The Social Media Marketing Mix - The 4 P’s

I am sure all of you know all about the marketing mix. You know, “The 4 P’s” which includes Product, Price, Placement and Promotion. But now I just wanted to explore the mix with a different angle that relates to social media marketing. The four P’s I am about to bring up are a bit different than what we are used to seeing in the marketing mix. 

However, I believe they are the four fundamental elements of social media marketing.

You will also notice that I have left “Product” out of the mix; the reason is simple, if you don’t have a good product or service there is nothing to market or create customer loyalty towards that. It will fail either now or later. So I have taken product out of the mix because everything else surrounds the product or the service itself. That is why there is a mix and your product or service is fundamental to making this mixture work.

The First P = People

This is the most crucial part of the social media marketing mix. In the old days when traditional media reigned supreme, brands pushed their products. Today consumers are in control. People want to be heard and people know they can be heard. So the first thing that needs to be done to utilize social media is listening to these people. Let’s not even get to participating and engaging right now, because they are secondary. The main goal at this point is to listen to what others are saying.

If you are a known brand, there are people talking about you. They are talking on the web, they are talking over dinner at the table and they are talking on the phone about your product while taking a shit. The power in social media lies in being all ears at first so you can analyze. So as to see what they are saying, what emotions your product is evoking among these people. Whether you call them your target market or people that help you with research and development (yup they can be your R&D team if you listen to them), the first element of your mix is people. Without people you have no one to listen to, you have no one to cater to, you have no one to engage with and you have no one to sell to.

The Second P = Platform

Now that you know the key to making things happen for you business revolves around people, you need to know where these people are hanging out. Although your first reaction might be to jump on Twitter and Facebook, which may not always be the wisest decision. You need to know what platform these people (people you want to reach out to) are on. If most of your consumers reside in Brazil, your first option might be to monitor Orkut which is huge in Brazil rather than Facebook and so on. The key is to know where the people you want to reach out to are. Opening a Facebook account just because everyone is using it may not be the right approach for you.

Maybe your target market is not really heavy on these “social networking” sites; communicate heavily on one of the early forms of social media such as forums. In that case you should be finding these forums where “your people” are talking, and listen to them to see how they see your product or services. Just because everyone is on YouTube, Facebook, etc. doesn’t mean these are the first platforms you should target on. You need to find where the people are (the first element) and choose your platform and then expand to others. It will be much easier to jump in where the people who use your products and services are because that’s where they are comfortable. You can’t move a community that is already thriving on one platform and try and pull them where you want, you have to adapt to the platform they are on and keep listening.

The Third P = Participation

Of course you know all about the participation. Nothing happens on social media without participation and this is the third element of social media marketing mix. You are listening to people, you know where they are and it’s time to engage. It’s time to respond and tell them you are listening. Everyone is always touting you should participate and engage but this is not the first step in utilizing social media for your business. You need to listen first and know what they are saying so you are ready to participate and respond.

Social media is all about participation. But participation doesn’t mean simply starting a conversation for the sake of it. Participation means knowing how to build a relationship with people who are using your products/services or are thinking of it. How do you make these people to buy and talk more about your product so the word spreads? Just listen to them and respond to their concern. Be where they are and BE THERE.

The Fourth P = Promotion

Promoting a product on the web isn’t easy. Sure you can shout and say “buy me,” but it would be hard to sell using that approach. The last element of social media marketing is the one that is already happening if you are integrating the first three elements. You may not see the impact in sale or word of mouth activity right away but as you move forward, you will be monitoring a lot more chatter about your brand, hopefully in a positive way.

Of course to sell products and services you have to promote. Just listening and responding won’t do the magic alone, so you need a strategy to tap into the people you have now made friends with. Try going on Facebook, Twitter, Forums, YouTube or any other community platforms and say “buy our products” and the community will say to you “Don’t tell us what to do, ask us. Ask us politely because we matter.” The words may not be exact but that’s what the implications will be. Be careful when promoting.

Wait it out, build the community around your brand and listen to them when they bring problems. When they have a concern, respond to them what you are doing to fix them. That right there is your promotion. That right there will boost word of mouth marketing. When you have a loyal group of people that are ready to talk about you, unleash the marketing genius in you.

These four elements are very critical to make things happen for your brand through different social media channels. Like I said, although I didn’t include “product” in the mix, don’t assume it’s not there. The product or the service is the reason why these four elements are required. If you have to call it The 5 P’s of social media marketing, so be it.

Source: Scribd.com