Social Media, A Community Spirit

We all know how effective TV, radio, bill board marketing is, it’s something we see and register-even absent mindedly, on a day to day basis. With so many different methods of advertisement, it can sometimes be easy to over look social media as a great and highly effective means of marketing. This article briefly looks at how these networks can help you increase your market and business prospects.

Now, it is important to remember that Facebook has over 500 million users world wide, Twitter has roughly 170 million. That is a HUGE potential market, and that’s not even taking into consideration other social networks like Linked.In or Myspace for example. Do not waste the opportunity to target these people!

One key idea for marketing your social media audience, is to consider them as a ‘Community’ rather than a large group of individuals. This is because social media allows you to establish united bands of people with similar interests in the same topics and issues and the great thing is, they can be found in one place- the internet! This makes your marketing strategy much easier as you can adapt it to reach and appeal to this larger group of people by any social media available to you. This means get yourself and your business on Facebook and Twitter.

You will need to work on establishing yourself within your own marketing community first of all. A few Reply Campaigns, keyword searches and eye catching updates, all help you target-but not spam-those who have the same interests as you and your business nature. Take the time to interact with them and contacting them directly if they ask you questions or just top say thanks for mentioning us in a post. A good customer relationship will help you establish a best community and by working hard to gain their trust, you can start to leave the marketing up to them as they will actually be the people selling your product by word of mouth and their own social media outlets.

Another reason why ‘Community’ should be at the forethought of your mind when campaigning, is because of the priceless and invaluable  importance and strength of the “Re-tweet” or “Like” buttons and even other apps like ‘Buffer’. All you need is one follower or friend to reproduce your advertisement or update on their page and will be seen by even more people, IE, part of their community, thus gaining you a greater reach for your business and market. This is  important because, on average, people are 60% more likely to trust suggestions made by friends (Invoke Solutions).

Social media fosters closer and better company-customer/prospective customer interaction – call it Word-of-Mouth 2.0”- Scott Bradley, a social media strategist at Networking Effectively.

Social network communities often grow through viral marketing. Now, this does not mean that businesses are sending out hacking links or anything at all unsavoury. This just means a link, such as an offer, voucher, sale awareness etc. gets seen and reproduced (via re-tweets or ‘likes’, for example) by people connected to the business. Now this is easy marketing for you and your company. You send out one or two links which are initially seen by your community who then reproduce it so it spirals, even with a very limited marketing budget!  But even more thrilling is the fact that once members connect within a social network community they tend stay there. This extreme customer loyalty makes social network communities highly valuable.

Advantages of Social Network Communities:

- Members sign into social network community often, sometimes daily. This opens up the opportunity to lots of page impressions and a huge advertising inventory.

- Saves money so your bank account does not hurt by the end.

- Allows you to interact with your community. This is always a good thing, a quick “Thanks for the re-tweet” never goes amiss and helps your followers open up to you more and be far ore responsive in the future.

- Saves time so you can concentrate on other advertising campaigns that you might have lined up.

- The silent buyer, this is a person(s) who will typically buy your item or service as well even though they may not reproduce or interact.

Now, go get to know your community!

~Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/iamkat