Social Media Strategy

Developing a social media strategy is one of the primary objectives of many sellers these days, because let's face it, it is a coming thing. Different forms of social media have become emerging tools for advertisers, producers and suppliers all across the world. In this article, the first part of the article, discusses the logic of such a media and its advertising potential and some effective strategies have been defined in the second part. Take a look.

About Social Media

After the Second World War, maximizing the sales of a firm was considered (rationally), as a way to enhance profits of the firm. Consumers, as an entire class were targeted by simple media forms such as billboards, hand outs similar forms of advertisements that were simple and inexpensive. As advertisements started delivering better and better results, they became costly and conventions such as discounts, memberships, using actors in advertisements became popular. The really expensive ones started entering the markets, such as advertisements on television, newspapers, magazines and radio.

The Internet and telecommunications revolution started new trends in social media marketing strategy. Manufacturers, advertisers and sellers all over the world started becoming conscious of the costs and methods of advertising. The basic problem was simple, when a seller, say a sports company advertises its sports shoes on the television, it needs to pay billions of dollars so as to convey the existence of the product to people and society at large. The probability of consumers purchasing this product is low and the entire sum that is used for the advertisement is quite difficult to recover. Concurrently the costing method of per unit cost is used by companies to decide the price of one pair of shoes, which becomes very high. Thus, this kind of costly advertising becomes rather unreasonable and companies have indeed suffered several losses in the past, and the social media has become a great place to market and advertise goods and services. The cost of advertising on social media is low which also brings down the cost of one unit.

Some Effective Strategies

Here is a small list of social media marketing strategy plans that are implemented by the companies.

Websites
One of the primary forms of social media strategies is to use websites. The Internet has proved to be a great blessing to all advertisers as it strongly reduced the budgets of advertisements. Websites dedicate a faction of the web page for various advertisements and as the prevalence of accessing the world-wide web is growing day by day such advertising is becoming more and ore popular. The cost of advertisement is very small and there are two methods that are used to derive this cost, namely, the size of advertisement or the cost per click. Often, upon clicking the link or advertisement, that user is redirected to the official website of the user.

Some other common tools that are used to promote goods and services include, viral, interactive tools, tag, clouds, bookmarking, RSS feeds/readers and online calculators. Well apart from such sites that sell or interact with people, the catalog with very good depictions of the products is also presented on the manufacturers official website.

Blogs and Forums
Some producers themselves pay people to write blogs, reviews and articles about their products to promote other people to buy them. Some reviews though paid are realistic and in some cases they really help out people. For example when it comes to large cost products such as cars and musical instruments, realistic writings do help lot. The world-wide web has proved to be a good venue for people to search for what they want and for sellers who can provide in-depth graphics, videos, pictures and writings of their products at a very negligible cost. Some manufacturer also have forums within their official website where users, potential buyers and review writers can come up and discuss the products.

Social Networking Sites
Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace have been evergreen on the web. The extra space which is available on these web pages is granted to advertisers. There are several software tools that are used by the advertisers to depict the advertisements on such pages. For example the advertisement may appear according to the interests of the user or the hobbies of the users. Though such systems are very complex, their results are excellent.

Search Engine Optimization
Web pages that do not belong to social networking sites or to private domains can be SEO'ed - search engine optimization. Which means that the information and advertisements on them are according to the search options of the users. If the user of a search engine is searching for 'sports shoes' then if a certain websites web page is SEO'ed, then that specific web page will among the first few search options that appear on the front page. Advertisers or sellers bid on this high-ranking page. Note SEO is an extremely difficult task and arranging information on this page as per the search results is equivalent to near impossibility.

Sales Through Internet
Another great social media strategy is to grant the purchase options with the advertisement itself. With the help of this strategy the consumer can instantly buy the product with the help of his credit card. The product is later on shipped to the consumer. Some sites are specifically designed to sell through the Internet.

Others
The communications revolution has granted sellers some other better options such as an MLM (multi-level marketing) where the consumers themselves can sell the products to other consumers at a discounted rate and can themselves avail the same. This agency is very popular for cosmetic products and home necessity products. Text message advertising and email advertising is another way to advertise, market and sell products.

Planning strategies for marketing on social media is a highly dynamic sub field of marketing, sales and advertising with new ideas being implemented every day. It is a revolution of marketing and advertising.