Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Your Strategic Marketing Plan for Business MUST include Social Media Marketing

WorldClass Brand Management, the company behind the WorldClassID Social Media Marketing Service, offering a truly industry changing social software service in the SocialSphere™. Just like Software-as-a-Service or SaaS has become the standard for cloud computing, Social Media Marketing Service or SnsS is predicted to become the standard for social network management. At a time when managing personal brand or corporate brand will become increasingly important as well as tough. Moreover it will also resolve issues faced while managing multiple username and passwords for numerous social networking sites.


Investing in a Social Networking Strategy

Managing your online identity in the social media until now has been overwhelming and challenging, not only because there are already hundreds of social communities, but also because multiple social networks are launched on virtually a weekly basis. We all suffer from networking social overload, the information overload of being involved in a social network, not just one network social, but numerous social networking sites. How many online id, social identities or social user accounts do you have? Are we being consumed with social definition and is brand management being redefined in our newly social society? Until now you were limited to the manual, tedious and boring task of physically managing multiple social networking accounts which is very expensive from both a time and money perspective. In order to evaluate how best to invest in your own social network marketing strategy, you have to determine whether that social marketing plan can 1) save you time, 2) save you money, or 3) make you money. If your social marketing plan doesn’t hit at least one of those three elements, then you’re just wasting resources and you should invest elsewhere.

Social Media Marketing Issues

Social media marketing uses social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to engage with prospects on an ongoing basis. Social media sites encourage discussions, feedback and sharing of information between you and your prospects.


Social media marketing has really sprouted its wings within the last couple of years And its no wonder, YouTube has about 28,000,000 viewers and Facebook has over 100,000,000 users…and over 50% log in daily. That’s why social media marketing is essential to your businesses success.


You’ll see immediate benefits like prospect awareness of your “brand”, you’ll become closer to your customers and find out more about their needs, you’ll build customer loyalty by relationship marketing and social media marketing is cheap but very powerful.


There are several different types of social media marketing, from social media networks like Facebook and Twitter to social bookmarking sites like Delicious and StumbleUpon and it can easily overwhelm you if you don’t have a strategic social media marketing plan.


One important point before you jump into the social media marketing area. There’s a saying that “When a promoter moves in, the prospects move out”. What that means is that you should not use social media only to promote your business. You should visualize it as a public relation tool and a customer retention system. Nothing drives people away faster than self promotion…so be careful, only use “soft promotions” when using social media sites.


So how does social media help your business? That’s a good question and once again it all comes back to back linking to your business website. When done properly, you’re social media sites will drive prospects back to your business website and create back links. The more back links your site has, the more relevant it is seen by the search engines and therefore the higher rankings you will receive. It will be seen as an authoritative site for your industry, bringing your company more and more customers.


As you can see, social media marketing is a very powerful tool and should have a place in your business’ overall marketing strategy. But be careful, you may find yourself spending too much time “posting” and “tweeting”. You should find a web developer who can integrate many of these social media sites and link them together so when you post content to one, it will automatically post to all of your accounts instantly.


Lack of having a social network strategy can be worse than the proverbial ostrich sticking the head in the ground, and doing nothing is a recipe for potential social networking disaster. Do you know whether someone Googled you today? If so, do you know how many times your name was Googled? Do you know what shows up when someone Googles your name? Do you know how to change the results if something negative shows up on your Google name search?


When you are doing social analysis of what your social identity looks like to the outside world the use of social networking software inside the social network is a total necessity. You have already learned, or will come to learn, the logistic challenge of trying to manually protect and defend your personal brand or business brand in the social networking arena. Just managing the top 5 social networking sites is a daunting task, requiring the investment of time and money which you can easily estimate is thousands of dollars on a monthly basis. So how do you keep up with all this social networking without losing your sanity?


Social Media Marketing Strategy


In case you are still trying to figure out whether having a personal brand management plan is important or not, read the following article, “10 Reasons You Have To Manage Your Personal Brand”

[http://www.WorldClassID.com/page/personal-brand-managemnt]


If your believe your social marketing branding and online reputation, online identity and brand development require involvement in social networking websites, the question then becomes where do you focus your limited time and limited money? If one site like Facebook makes sense, should you also participate in MySpace or Bebo? If one social network is good, are ten social websites better and is participation in one hundred or more social networking sites the best? If participating in every possible social network is the best, how do I physically do that?


The logic of just the time required to create and manage just one social network would make you believe that you don’t want to join every social network because the only way you think it’s possible to do that isn’t scalable. You just don’t have enough hours in a day to manage more than just a few accounts. You could hire someone on a full time basis, but even that strategy has limitations that make in unscalable.


List of Social Networking Websites


So if you have limited time and limited money to invest in a social networking strategy, where do you go? We have compiled an ever growing list of social websites, so please go to the following links to see the entire list with URL links:


· Top 10 Social Networking Websites

· Top 10 Social Blogging Websites

· Top 10 Social Video Sharing Websites

· Top 10 Social Bookmarking Websites

· Top 10 Social Photo Sharing Websites

· Top 10 Social Professional Networking Websites

· Top 10 Social Press Release Websites

· Top 10 Social Article Posting Websites

· Top 10 Social Music Sharing Websites


The challenge is the idea that you can limit your social marketing strategy in any way. Even if you decide to limit your strategy to just the Top 10 websites in each of the 9 categories listed above (remember, there are over 350+ in total) that means you’re looking at 90 social memberships! If you believe that having a strategic social networking plan is a valuable investment, then you should also understand that having a presence in ALL the social websites is important. Why? Because there are potential customers, potential eyeballs who are in social networks other than the Top 10 who you’re not going to reach if you don’t show up in the other social networks.


Social Media Marketing Service (SnsS) – an obvious solution


The old adage of work smarter not harder seems obvious. The only way to work smarter and have a reasonable solution to managing hundreds of social networks is through an automated software solution. That is the essence of what WorldClassID is and does. It is a technology solution which takes the manual and highly complicated process out of the equation and creates a repeatable, scalable solution for dealing with hundreds of social networking sites.

No comments:

Post a Comment