Social Media Strategy. Exactly what is it?
Social media strategy is the deployment and development of modern strategic plans for social media.
A Social media strategy incorporates these new ways of communication where media is not only broadcast but also shared, commented, opined edited or modified by the public at large. Social media has been the rage since the advent of Web 2.0. Social media is now a serious channel for marketing, branding and creating an online community. Present day social media strategies revolve around sharing content between users. Users share a plethora of content including, but not limited to pictures, videos, information, articles, voting, opinions et al. Social media strategy and social media optimization[1] have been a very important area of focus for most corporate and celebrities to target a wider audience base.
Do you have Social Media Strategy Marketing Questions?
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Social Media Strategy Statistics
The keyword phrase “Social Media Strategy” has 4,547 results in Google News[2] which is a strong indicator on how hot this topic is today.
Google Trends[3] shows a 19.6% increase in searches for "social media strategy" from 2008.
According to Mashable[4] , Coca Cola recently rolled out a social media strategy dubbed Coca-Cola’s Expedition 206 campaign, in which the company uses social media to pick three individuals to travel the world in 2010, who in turn visit all 206 markets where Coca-Cola has a presence.
Why social media strategies have become relevant
According to Quantcast[5] You Tube had 619M visitors on 8/21/09 FaceBook had 4.9B visitors on 10/31/09 and Twitter had 301M visitors on 8/21/09.
Social Media Strategy: without a proper strategy for social media (whatever your purpose is) your chances of success are reduced. A clearly defined social media strategy is critical when entering this online world.
Following are recommended social media strategies from Randi Thornton[6] :
Goals: categorize your goals
Research: A solid social media strategy begins with identifying your audience and creating a persona.
Navigation: how to implement the best strategy based on your social media persona research
Engagement: how will you encourage engagement and create a community?
Maintain: Both monetary and time allocation
Monitoring: online reputation
Social Media strategies verses traditional marketing strategies
Traditional media has historically been revolving around the mediums of print, radio, television and mailings. Only companies of scale and reach would be able to tap in such expensive, large yet powerful mediums of communication to reach out. With the advent of modern day social media, reaching out to the public has become easier with hundreds of ways to connect with their audience.
It is found that people spend up to 17% of time online, on social networking sites. Advertisers across sectors rush to capitalize on this new trend. From August 2008 to August 2009, the entertainment industry’s expenditure on online advertising through social networking has witnessed an astounding 812% growth while other sectors even showed negative growth in other advertising media. Despite the recession, online advertising expenditure on top social networking and blogging sites have shot up by as much as 119%.
The costs in engaging, targeting and converting a sales call are much cheaper, profitable and quicker in the case of social media when compared to the traditional media. Print media covers a lot of varied audience without engagement; however, marketing is most effective when the target population is specifically engaged.
Social Media Strategy Implementation once you have mapped out your social media strategy these are platforms to investigate:
Blogs
Most companies and corporations have blogs where updates on their products or recent launches are posted. Blogs have given such companies to directly interact with their target audience and thereby improve the quality and reach of their products or services. For individuals, blogging is mostly about their opinions and points of view about a service, a situation or a product or quite simply their own life. Majority of the users tend to stick to the free blogging platforms like Wordpress or Blogger or Typepad and the like. Eminent personalities also blog but mostly do it on their own dedicated sites. Originally, blogs featured articles and text content but with the widespread presence of high speed internet, they also feature user created content such as photographs, music, videos and the like.
Social Networking
Sites like Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, Hi5 et al offer people a new way to stay in touch well beyond the traditional ways of email, IMs and voice/video conferences. Services like these offer an integrated solution comprising of messages, videos and photo sharing, birthday reminders and games. Services like LinkedIn offer professional social networking where users connect to each other on a professional level.
Micro blogging
Platforms like Twitter, Plurk, Tumblr et al promote the concept of micro blogging. Twitter, for example has a 140 limit word count. Users can send and receive short messages and links. Micro blogging has shot to prominence given its utility, reach and conciseness. Companies now extensively use these platforms to reach out. Dell, Google, Bank of America, NASA have twitter presence wherein users can ‘Follow’ them for updates, concerns and questions. Micro blogging presence has become an essential part of a company’s online presence. Companies now use such platforms to propagate their products, services, offers, discounts and even customer care. Adding glitter are eminent personalities like Ashton Kutcher, Barack Obama, Shashi Tharoor and many more.
Content Sharing
With the advent of Web 2.0 and the quick ingress of high speed internet, content sharing has become hugely popular. Users now share videos through sites like youtube which often even offers HD videos, interesting URLs through services like StumbleUpon, host their own Wikis, use photo sharing services like Google’s Picasa or Flickr to upload and share photos, comment and opine about others’ photos and the like.
WHAT SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY HAS WORKED FOR YOU?
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