Now-a-days, social media marketing has become the craze of the internet as it connects the users with the peers, community and business. Social media marketing is a powerful medium to advertise a product or service valuable to the netizens. Social media marketing planning process is an approach for the development and implementation of program and the process consists of six phases. They are problem description, formative research, strategy development, intervention design, evaluation and implementation. Most common social websites for promoting business include Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Vine, Tumblr and Foursquare. Some of the top and successful social media marketing strategies implemented in 2013:
- · Social Feedback: Brands will have both positives and negatives. Brands that listen and engage with their audience well in time avail the benefits out of the social conversation amongst the consumers. Brands will strategize and focus radically towards social feedback using the listening tools, conversation tracking software and other analytics.
- · Legitimate Competition Staging: Espionage is now legitimate. This will help them gain on the competition being a first mover and innovator. Also, the strategy will help the customers stay off from the competitors.
- · Virtual Performance Measurement: To ensure the quality improvements the performance measurement of employees has to be targeted.
- · Social Intelligence Optimization: Social world isn’t just limited to the marketing but also supply chain, management and operations. Global suppliers have started to build trust within their customers and generate bigger business volumes.
- · Location Based Service Delivery: Companies are expanding efforts to set up location centric social reviews that will generate alerts which will deliver results.
- · Increase in the Customer Recommendation: Brands would be depending additional on their social connections for product reviews and recommendations so to be able to produce a greater viral over the web.
- · Info-graphic and Micro Blogging: Consumers will be following brands on Twitter and Pinterest than on Facebook. This will also lead to a double fold increase in the content management activities like blogging and posting them on micro blogging sites.
All the distinctive features of socialmedia marketing focuses on consumer orientation, implements commercial marketing technologies and theory, tracks voluntary behaviour change, targets specific audience and focuses on personal welfare. Steps for creating your social media marketing strategy:
- First produce a web page on social media marketing and then promote your site or product. 9/10 people can see your page. Some will get stick to your page.
- Next is promotion. People get connected with your page and have an ability to share what they like.
- Interact strongly with your followers and give them what they need. It gives sense of trust and also produce strong bond with followers.
- Connect your site to all of your social media marketing pages. With the advancement in technology, you could present your page effectively.
- The average numbers of retailers followed on social media marketing are about 69% by Facebook, 85% by Twitter and 93% by Pinterest.
The future of online or digital marketing cannot ignore social media marketing for brand management andpromotion as the trend of socializing is poised to continue forever.
