By Zia Ul Aein
Are you having the right mix of social media marketing? Do you think that you have those competitive social media marketing strategies which can help you stay steps ahead of your competitor?
You are most welcome to read further if the answer to the questions above is either ”Maybe” or ”No”. A social media marketing strategy needs planning and careful execution. After the right placement of every aspect, you can benefit long term. Social media marketing helps you in connecting with your customers in real time. You are able to receive immediate feedbacks, a new offer is instantly delivered, target audience is perfectly reached and customer loyalty is achieved.
Social Media Marketing is a blend of Publishing > Sharing >> Discussing through Social Networking Sites > Microblogging >> Video Publishing >>> Photo Sharing >>>> Podcasting.
Social Media Marketing Strategy
A well planned social media marketing strategy is about the utilization of every single online social media. This technique brings diversity to the online presence of your business. There are four basic hubs of social media marketing.
We are going to start our discussion with Social Networking Sites. The giant of social networking sites is known as Facebook. According to the recent statistics, Facebook has 750 million active users and out of those, 50% log in on daily basis at any given time. On the average, each user has 
around 130 friends. 700 billion minutes are spent by people per month on Facebook. If we talk about the mobile access, then 250 million Facebook users access their profiles via mobile and they do it two times more actively than non-mobile users.
Facebook is one out of many social networking sites or in other words, social media marketing opportunities. Creating a Facebook group or a page allows you to reach live, active and targeted audience. Twitter allows tweeting and retweeting updates and news in real time which is indexed by Google and many other search engines. Creating a profile over Linkedin provides your business with an exposure in the form of connection with professionals and other businesses.
The second online aspect of social media marketing is Microblogging. Blogging or blogs are a healthy way of interaction with your audience, especially your loyal customers. You can also direct traffic from your blog to your company or business website.
A blog should be regularly updated and monitored. A community of loyal readers is created by responding to the comments and creating internal links. Microblogging on the other hand includes sending out short but interesting news and updates related to your company like on Twitter.
There are many famous company blogs which you can view in order to get an idea about how a company blog should look like and what kind of content it should have.
Video sharing is more than just an enjoyment now. YouTube has changed the world of video sharing. Some years back, YouTube was a hub for people from the entire world to share personal videos and main focus was on the funny content. Now, 
businesses and professionals are taking video sharing as a serious matter by creating ads and videos related to their products and services.
As a business owner, you can share videos of your product developments, offers, press releases or information in the form of slide shows. Videos in the form of product reviews serve as the most important source for people to know about the pros and cons of a product which later on influence their buying decision.
Millions of iPods are sold every year and this brings us to the last but not least online aspect of social media
marketing which is known as Podcasting. The term ”Pod” in Podcasting originated from iPod because the trend of downloading and listening to podcasts started after the invention of iPod. People find it easy and interesting to keep themselves updated while on the move.
This is the reason why so many companies create podcasts and make them available for download for their customers to listen and get their knowledge polished about the latest innovations and offers. Podcast.com and Apple’s Podcast store are on the top of the list for famous Podcast sites.
My next blog post will focus on the things which should be considered before the formulation of a social media marketing strategy.
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