Social Marketing is the future of marketing. With the popularity of Facebook and Twitter, Just to name the a few, It should be obvious why. Recently the Queen of England even joined Facebook. I doubt she is on it as much as my wife though. Facebook has over 500 million active users spending 700 billion minutes per month on the site. Yes, I said BILLION! Twitter is gaining steam with over a 100 million users growing at 300 thousand a day. Some others are Myspace, Blogger, Tribe, YouTube, etc.
You would think it was the sheer numbers of potential customers that draws marketers to social sites. Actually it is the ROI. If you are business person you know what this means. Return On Investment is what drives business. For every dollar you spend you want a certain return on that investment. Businesses that are successful have a high ROI. To stay in business it definitely needs to be in the positive. If you spend $10,000 in advertising on PPC to make $5,000 in sales you have a negative and unfavorable ROI. The beauty of social marketing is that it that the ROI is extremely high because the cost is usually FREE. The complicated part of this equation is that you measuring dollars of return against time invested instead of advertising dollars spent.
It only makes good business sense to market ALL the people using these social networking media sources. Just like anything there is a right way and a wrong way to market socially. Nobody wants to sit next to the guy on the airplane selling insurance. It is no different here either. People will buy but never want to be “SOLD”. This is especially true in the social networks. If a marketer is not careful they can expose themselves as wanting nothing more than to make a buck. You must build the relationships first and present the products to your followers as a personal recommendation from someone feel will give good advice. You do this by presenting yourself as someone just like them. The more they can identify with you the better your chances of successfully marketing your product.
It can be a little time consuming in the beginning of your marketing campaign. It could be a little while before you start seeing traffic. That is the only drawback to this form of marketing. Once you have your base of followers though you can start to really see the efforts pay off. Many get discouraged because they do not get the instant stream of traffic immediately. Be patient and diligent and you will see plenty of traffic targeted to what you are selling.
Since you have a good deal of time invested in getting the traffic you want to make sure you make the most of it. The best way to do this is to is to capture the potential customers information as they are checking out your product. This can be done with a squeeze page and some sort of opt in mailing list. The trick is to entice them to sign up. This can be free tips, information, or anything that might make them curious and motivate them to give you their email address. Once you have their email address the possibilities for future solicitations are limitless. Making your success limitless.
The one constant in this world is change. This is especially true in the world of the internet. It can be hard to keep up sometimes. It is important to change with it if you are going to make the most of your business opportunities. Who knows what changes are on the horizon but the one thing for sure is that Social Media is growing fast and has not even come close to hitting its peak. This is one wave you might want to get on and ride for awhile.