The popularity of social networking sites nowadays such as Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and many others have sparked a novel form of marketing in the Internet: social media marketing. The premise behind this form of marketing is simple. You make your business visible in social networking sites by making business-related posts. You interact with people on these sites as necessary. If possible, you can even let the members of these sites do your marketing for you – they will spread the word about your products or services to other members.
Once you have the basic premise, it is easy to see the benefits of this form of marketing in the Internet. Marketing through social media makes you accessible to millions of customers all over the world. It is just the same “word-of-mouth” marketing expanded to a larger scale. You can greatly boost your clientele’s numbers with this form of marketing, especially if one of your campaigns goes “viral”, meaning, it spreads like wildfire. (However, the consequences of a botched social media campaign will spread far and wide too and that can have remarkable consequences).
Another good thing about social media marketing is that it enables business to interact with customers on a more personal level. Whenever customers have suggestions and feedback on social media sites, they can expect to get immediate responses from businesses. There are many ways that marketers can employ on social media so that they can gain the patronage of customers. They can use photographs, videos, and short posts. They can include relevant links to important websites. And they can count on loyal customers to make other customers know about their businesses.
By knowing all these, you may think that marketing through social networking sites isn’t problematic. However, there are a few things you need to consider. Marketing through social media takes plenty of effort before you can expect any ROI. Also, many marketers would have to reallocate their time from other marketing duties to marketing through social media. For marketers from small and medium businesses, that is easy to do; many social networking sites allow free signing up. For marketers from bigger businesses, plenty of deliberation is necessary to find out whether marketing through social networking sites is a good alternative to already existing marketing approaches.
So should you try social media marketing? Because it’s easy to execute, perhaps you can do so for a while, but you should be able to objectively judge its effectiveness.
