Social Media Marketing – Are You Doing It?

 Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a form of internet marketing, which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through the participation in various social media networks like You Tube, My Space, and Face book, social web application like dig, delicious, reddit, Wiki. The goal of each SMM program varies from business to business, but mainly involves building of brand awareness, increasing visibility and through this, sells a product or service. 

Social Media Marketing is becoming an essential marketing tool for connecting with customers and optimizing online presence. Social Media describes the tools and platforms, people use to publish, converse and share content online. Video, pod cast, blogs, discussion boards and social networking sites are all tools, online businessmen can use to build relationship with their customers and keep them on websites longer. Social media provides more opportunities for organizations to present optimized content that can be indexed by search engines and ultimately improves site rating. 

To implement some of the social media elements, it is first important to evaluate your customers to create an effective strategy. If your consumers are professionals who commute, then pod cast can be downloaded and can be very effective. Posting video content on YouTube is a unique opportunity to improve your position in Google’s universal search results. WithYouTube, customers can visit the site, view your video and easily post to their own blogs, social networking profiles or websites. YouTube is a great way to reach a broader viewer and generate buzz around new products, especially if your product has a visual appeal.  Building healthy relationship with the customer, that last is an on-going process for a businessperson. Social media takes this a step further by making that relationship personal through blogs. It tells about you, not only about your product or service.  A blog, which includes video, pictures and text, can build interest and loyalty among customers and a new way to search engine optimization. Create a page dedicated to community with website visitors and this will be interactive. 

Social media encourages social visits to your site. Keep adding content to encourage customers to return regularly. With the advent of social media, consumers have become contributors, contributing to brand messaging. SMM is related to other online tactics such as SEO, SMO. It has a more active planned role in directing, influencing and suggesting the community members.

Is Video Marketing An Effective Marketing Tool?

In the era of the internet marketing and search engine marketing it has become really important that we adopt good strategies to promote our products, services or other offerings. Web has become a great medium to popularize whatever we want to reach the mindset of masses or selected target audiences. However, people pay more attention to visuals than the written text and hence video marketing has become more popular than the articles.

In the era of web2.0 it is more important to use the resources in a correct manner. Nobody would sit and watch your videos if they are plainly filled with the pushy statements and connotations that “You should buy my product, it’s the best”. You need to create videos that educate the audience, tell them what’s great about your product in a convincing manner and if you manage to do that then certainly people would be awed by your creation and promote it further.

You can create videos in variety of ways and they can be simple video landing pages, webpage with streaming videos, downloadable files or customer reviews etc.

Visual communication is always more impacting and influential than the written. It is rightly said that a picture is worth a hundred words because it helps to communicate an idea in a more precise and correct way without need of excessive explanation or detail. On the other hand if the picture or visual is not intelligently crafted than it may fail to give the real explanation and thus the thoughts and ideas may be mis-communicated. So there is need to create videos for video marketing in a clear and correct manner.

The creativity and ability to innovate is the key in this field. You may go in for animated videos or real life videos. It can certainly be used as a powerful medium to attract interested buyers into your market base. As per the statistics more than 9 out of 10 people would want to watch videos rather than reading articles. And another survey reveals that video marketing has more than 60% of the customers than the other channels of communication in the internet marketing.

It is important that the videos which you create are made in good quality and correct format. There are a lot of social video sharing sites like Yahoo video and YouTube by Google group which can create a lot of hype about your videos. You just need to share and upload your videos on these sites, If your videos have good content and are affirmatively educative and interesting, people would be more than glad to share them with others. In this way there would be immense popularity of your video. The more number of people watch your video greater would be the sales of your product.

Viral video marketing is indeed a great way to proliferate the sensitivity and idea behind your product to larger to a wider audience.