Learn what social media marketing is, how it helps brands gain more visibility on the web, and why it’s essential to your marketing strategy.
The Arab Spring protests kicked off on December 17, 2010.
For two years, dictatorial governments across Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain were challenged by their long-oppressed people.
This chain reaction also led to uprisings across Morocco, Iraq, Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, and Sudan.
Social media’s ability to both mobilize and catalyze individual experiences in real time played a central role in empowering the masses to fight for their perceived injustice.
Then, on the other end of the spectrum, you have rampant disinformation.
Just like that – in the blink of an eye – social media goes from hero to villain.
And that’s only part of the reason why social media marketing continues to be misunderstood (at best) or divisive (at worst).
Because to understand how to do social media marketing properly, you first need to understand what social media is (and isn’t).
What does social media marketing mean? (And why is it important?)
Social media is a catch-all term for any digital, interactive community. For instance, Twitter is a platform designed to let people share short messages and media links with others. Facebook, meanwhile, is a full-blown social networking site where users share updates, images and videos, join events and groups, and do a variety of other activities. 카지노사이트
Social media marketing is the use of popular social media platforms to connect with your target audience and market your brand’s products and services.
Nothing in marketing is new.
For instance, “content marketing” might currently be en vogue. But it’s been around since at least 1900 when the Michelin tyre (with a “y”) company created the Michelin Guide books as a way to get tourists to drive more, sampling various restaurants throughout France.
A book. Celebrating restaurants and chefs. Created by a tire company. To sell more tires.
Sounds a whole lot like what we’re all doing today!
Incredibly, John Deere’s The Furrow actually beat the French upstarts by five years, with the first publication rolling out in 1885.
Social media is no different.
Social networks haven’t changed marketing. It isn’t some new-fangled thang. The underlying principles behind building an audience of active users on TikTok actually aren’t that different from doing the same inside AOL fan pages nearly two decades ago.
Sure, some obvious things are different. Tech standards have evolved tremendously. The rules of engagement are different. In other words, how you go about executing the tactics has evolved.
To better understand a social media marketing strategy, then, view it through the same 1960s lens as the 4Ps you learned on the very first day in Marketing 101:
Most marketers today focus on the bottom two Ps to drive business goals:
- Promotion: This includes all the various ways to generate interest for your business, including advertising, PR, direct sales, word of mouth, and more.
- Place/Distribution: To strategically locate your brand in channels where your ideal customers will discover it. 바카라사이트
A social media marketing plan is like an amalgamation of those two classic marketing principles that have been around since the golden days of advertising.
Social media marketing is an interactive, online water cooler operating 24/7 across every single time zone on the planet.
You can use it to develop awareness, produce and amplify authentic word of mouth (that used to and still does already happen offline), and at the same time foster loyalty with your organization’s zealots.
So it’s not “new” per se.
Social media marketing takes things that have already existed for decades, like the town square in some feudal state centuries ago, and combines it with a megaphone to amplify the same conversations across every other town just like it in the known world.
This can be confusing or off-putting to older generations that see “real life” and “social media” as two distinctly separate environments. Younger ones, 온라인카지 however, typically don’t have that same point of view.
Imagine the impact of this quote from a recent Financial Times article. China, which actively monitors and censors its own social media alternatives like WeChat, recently started squashing “thousands of protestors” online, banning them for life.