How Good Is Your Social Media Marketing? – Part 2

October 3, 2011

By Zia Ul Aein

Formulation of a Social Media Marketing Strategy and Things to Consider Beforehand

Social media marketing can be a beneficial and successful path for your business, product or service to adopt. Proper planning and right formulation is very important otherwise every strategy can backfire and your objective of achieving the best marketing techniques can get hurt.

Before you formulate your social media marketing strategy, understand the state of online presence in which your organization is at the moment.  The focus of this post is on the things which you should consider before the formulation of a SMM strategy.

social media marketing

Analyze Your Online Presence

  • Keep a considerate eye on the statistics of your website. You should be aware of the total number of visitors on your website and their origin.
  • Find out the amount of visitors which are directed to your website by the search engines.
  • The number of links your website has with other sites.
  • The activeness of your website in the target markets.
  • Compare your strategies with the competitors and find out what they are doing better than you and what you are doing better than them.
  • Find out if you already having a presence or reputation over social media sites or if you need to start from the very first step.

target audience

Know Your Target Audience

You should be aware of the:

  • Interaction level of your audience (how do they interact with the businesses, products and services like yours).
  • Keywords used by your audience to search for the products and services.
  • Needs and interests of your target audience.

Turning Your SMM Strategy into a Successful One

  • In case of an organization, you need to achieve commitment and dedication from your top management and especially marketing department so that you can attain the goals of your SMM strategy. Delivery of education and information would definitely be required in order to receive the maximum amount of commitment.
  • Start from micro goals and slowly move on to the macro strategies. Assign the tasks of posting and distribution of the content to the correct department such marketing or communications.
  • There are a number of social media marketing sites but you need to study all of them in order to identify the ones you need to focus the maximum amount of your attention on.
  • Do not dream or create those goals which you cannot achieve right now, always go with measurable, achievable and best marketing techniques.

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How Good Is Your Social Media Marketing? – Part 1

September 11, 2011

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

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 social networking sitesaround 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.

Facebook Blog

Google Blog

Acrobat Blog

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, video sharing sitesbusinesses 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 mediapodcasting 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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Facebook – More Than Just a Profile

September 10, 2011

By Zia Ul Aein

Facebook Marketing

Undoubtedly, Facebook is one of the most famous websites over the internet. With every passing day, thousands of people join the powerful online community of Facebook, fill up their profiles, add friends and chat with their loved ones. But, according to my perspective, Facebook is a lot more than just a profile and chat. For business owners, marketers and advertisers, Facebook is a pipeline of achievement and one of the best marketing techniques to flow through and prove to be successful.

There are a number of ways on Facebook using which you can promote your business, products or services.

Let’s start with Facebook Profile. The first thing you will need to create on Facebook in order to utilize other marketing techniques of Facebook is the Facebook profile. You can add the URL of your website or blog in the provided spaces along with a brief bio of your business. Make sure that you fill everything completely and wisely in your profile as empty or incomplete profiles are easily ignored.

After the creation of your profile, start adding Friends. Do not aim for adding 100 friends at a time because you can easily get flagged as a spam by Facebook and most probably your account will be blocked permanently. Add not more than 15 to 20 friends per day or every second day in order to keep it natural and secure. This way, you will easily be able to reach 500 friends in a month.

If you are looking for something like a forum, then Facebook Groups is the best way to go for. The best thing about Facebook Groups is the easy way to add people. You can add all of your Friends in your group and there is no need for them to approve it.

Facebook Groups

The only issue with Facebook Groups, just like that of a forum, is that you can only see the discussions or the content if you are a member of the group. This is because of the reason that Facebook Groups are not indexed by the search engines. Here I will recommend that you keep just a little part of your focus on Facebook Groups and more on the other marketing techniques of Facebook.

Facebook Pages are my personal favourites. I consider Facebook Pages as one of the best marketing techniques over the internet. Facebook pages are easy to promote because they are indexed by the Google and anyone can view the content.

You can make your Facebook page as attractive and interesting as possible. Fill out all of the necessary and important business information along with the URLs. Make sure that you use the most important keyword as the title of your Facebook Page in order to make it SEO friendly for search engines.

Facebook Pages

Facebook page is the perfect marketing technique to put the maximum amount of your focus on. You can make your Facebook page as viral as a Facebook group. Whenever you will post something in your Facebook page, each and every member of your page will get it displayed in his or her Newest Feeds section.

Facebook Applications is one of the most interesting developments of Facebook to this day. Anyone can create a Facebook application to engage users in different kind of activities. Some Facebook Applications are based on fun such as games whereas some are made for the sake of business promotion and they are proving to be useful for the users.

facebook-marketing

There are many Facebook applications which are having thousands of active users and if you want to create one for your business, product or services then check out the Facebook Developers page. After the creation of your application, you can market it in your profile, page or group.

Facebook Advertising is another great way to advertise your business. You can get unexpected CPC and CPM outputs with Facebook Advertising. If you haven’t created a Facebook Page yet then you can advertise an external website otherwise you can direct the traffic directly to your Facebook page. You can always target your audience according to age, gender, interests or locations.

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Why to Switch from Facebook or Twitter to Google Plus?

August 14, 2011

By Zia Ul Aein

If you are one of those folks who are making use of social media for 2-3 years now then most probably you are having a set of both professional and personal accounts divided between Facebook and Twitter. It is possible that you need both Twitter and Facebook to monitor and manage your social media activities because both of the social media websites provide different options for social media marketing.

What if there is a solution which has the properties of both Facebook and Twitter?

That solution is known as Google Plus. Google Plus was released by Google a few months ago and many people didn’t pay much attention to it just like Buzz. I was myself not so moved by Google Plus but recently I decided to sign up for it and see if it’s worth using as a social media website. At the moment, Google Plus is the first website I open when I turn on my laptop in the morning and it is also in my bookmarks. I found it very useful to switch from Facebook or Twitter to Google Plus and here is why:

  1. Google Plus proved itself to be an exclusive social media platform by introducing the concept of invite-only sign ups. Those people who were always attached to the network of social media jumped right in. The system of invites created a hassle and there are so many threads over different forums with at least 2000 replies where people are only asking for invites to sign up for a Google Plus account as fast as possible.
  2. You can easily set up your profile with Google Plus once you are in the account. There are five tabs named Posts, About, Photos, Videos and +1’s. Posts will be activated automatically after the creation of your Google Plus account and in +1’s tab you will be able to see the websites, photos, videos, posts or anything you did Google Plus to. Google Plus ProfileGoogle Plus 4 Tabs
  3. There is no need to create multiple accounts at Google Plus for personal or professional use because Google Plus Circles are there. You can write anything you want to and it will only be exposed to those people to whom you want it to. There is no need to spend hours in creating lists and adding people to those lists in Facebook when you can simply drag the people in Google Plus to specific circles. I have created around 7 circles named Friends, Family, People I Sort of Know, Following, Co-workers and my Business Relationships.google-plus-circles
  4. Video Hangouts in Google Plus, in my opinion, can present a great amount of competition to Skype. The video quality is actually better than in Skype and without paying any extra money you can start a video group session. Google Plus would simply inform the people in your circle that you are hosting a video stream and you should expect anyone to join in (and maybe make some new friends).Google Plus Hangout
  5. There is one last reason but definitely not the least which made me switch my social media efforts from Facebook or Twitter to Google and that is the availability of Gmail, Google Buzz and Search at one place. I can switch between all of those services without the need of logging into multiple accounts or opening multiple tabs. I can save both time and efforts with Google Plus and you can do the same.

There is no doubt that Facebook would make use of counter marketing strategies and Twitter would keep on acting as the gold mine for people with 140 character messages but Google Plus has its own place and people are slowly realizing that. It was unbearable for Google to see Google Buzz failing but now I see their efforts proving with Google Plus.

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Future of Internet Marketing

June 8, 2011

The advancement in internet technologies has brought an immense growth in the concept of online marketing. Now, E-commerce cannot be termed as a new idea and that can be proved by looking back at mid 90’s where ,after the popularity of internet started to occur amongst common people, new ideas like email marketing and link exchange came into being. However, the concept of online marketing has undergone a paradigm shift in the 20th century by the virtue of ideas like Pay Per Click, Articles Distribution, Press Releases, Search Engine Optimization, Link Campaign, Blogs, Viral Marketing etc. These ideas opened up a whole new curtain of marketing on the stage of Internet.


website marketing

The 21st Century has come up with a totally different concept of online marketing and one of the best marketing techniques is known as Social Media Marketing.

Social Media Marketing has revolutionized the internet marketing and there are so many social media sites available on the internet now that one can easily carry out the whole marketing plan of a website or a blog under their shadow. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are on the top of the list but there are many other popular social media sites as well, like:

And the list simply goes on and on…

As a matter of fact, the main objective of marketing professionals these days is to find other unique and interactive ways to reach their audience.

Online marketing and media nowadays is more like word-of-mouth marketing. You tell about your business or a website to two people and each of them will tell two other people.

word of mouth

Word of Mouth - Viral Marketing

This type of marketing or promotion is called as Viral Marketing in the terms of Internet Marketing. It requires no traditional advertising to be applied or bought to gain viral exposure.

So, it can be said that the future of internet marketing looks very much positive and it is impossible to doubt this fact. If you are looking to target a large number of audience then cuddling with the new baby of internet marketing, social media marketing can be cost effective and very feasible.

Posted By: Zia Ul Aein

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