Social Media Marketing

If you’re a new or not yet established brand, how should you use social media to build a reputation for yourself?

Apart from making sure your product/website is relevant to the social media channel, it is also useful to participate in social media communities as an end-user or brand representative.

My previous post on social networking ROI already talked about the benefits for building a strong social media presence so let’s move on to examine the characteristics which constitute successful social media profiles.

Return on Investment (ROI) is a simple concept: You set aside something of your own, be it time or money and expend it with the hope of getting something in exchange. ROI measures the profitability of your returns, when compared against your costs.

Many people have talked about ROI in relation to social media and one usually examines the performance of a social media marketing campaign using specific metrics like traffic, links or comments.

Some measure ROI in an more abstract way, by monitoring the amount of buzz or conversation in a community and the opinions of the public.

I’m a pretty active Digg user and I thought it’ll be helpful if I talked a little about the Digg tools that I use everyday. Don’t worry, I’m not going to overload you with 50+ redundant tools, most of which only look good but are quite useless.

Trust me, you really don’t need many tools when it comes to Digg. There are only a few which are truly essential. If you want to use Digg efficiently like a power user, try the ones in this list.

The term ‘link bait’ refers to materials created, published and spread online with the aim of attracting links, visitors and attention. These baits are often disseminated via social media websites, particularly social news communities like Digg or Reddit.

Ideally, you want as many people as possible to see these baits because this increases the potential for them to go viral. Social media channels are platforms to maximize visibility.

While primary channels like Digg might not send targeted traffic, they create opportunities for you to receive visitors and links from other relevant sources.

Twitter is a micro blogging platform which allows you to publish short messages of less than 140 characters through different mediums like IM, cellphones and the web.

It has a social element as well, as it allows users to befriend and monitor each other’s messages or updates. So what you have here is a publishing tool that can be either public and private.

It is similar to an IRC channel although messages are displayed less rapidly. Some have called it a slower version of internet messengers.

I recently wrote a beginners guide to social news websites and this article follows up on that by offering a list of the social news websites you can use to get information and web traffic.

There are a great deal of social news sites on the internet, sometimes too many. Most of them are dormant and are no longer active, largely because they were poorly marketed and hence, never had an active community of users in the first place.

Social Media users are emotionally connected to their communities. After visiting and using the social website for some time, some users naturally feel a sense of belonging within the community.

Although they are separate individuals, social media users gradually assimilate into the collective while developing in-group solidarity. This is when inside-jokes, memes and self-referential commentary starts to develop and spread from within the community.

This discourse influences the actions of other users. These behavioral displays and community-specific prejudices initially begin among established users, before transplanting itself within newer entrants into the social media community.

A powerful catalyst for viral marketing, social news websites are an excellent way to disseminate ideas and attract attention, traffic and links. These social media channels which will give you a platform to showcase your content and website to a large audience.

Even if you’re not interested in funneling visitors to your website, social news sites can easily be used as personal information-hubs.

They’ll provide you with quick access to a variety of news, along with the opinions of other users. Not only can you share content relevant to your interests, you can also participate in discussions with engaged members as well.

Before embarking on any social media marketing campaigns, it is essential to set your goals and define your prospects or target audience. Without a clear understanding of what you want to achieve and who you want to reach, your promotional campaigns will not be focused and the results may be fragmented and weak.

Determining your goals and target audience is a fairly important preliminary process when it comes to social media marketing.

This is not just plotting objectives for the sake of being organized; your goals directly determine the best strategy to take and the community to target.