What is Social Media?
When history will be written, 2008 would surely go down its pages, as a remarkable year in world politics. This year saw what Martin Luther King jr. dreamt of and that which Abraham Lincoln envisioned. In the month of November, the United States of America achieved yet another first of its kind - they voted for change; they elected a black American as their representative to what can modestly be alluded as the most powerful seat in global realpolitik. So it doesn’t come as a great surprise that US
Having worn down the initial euphoria, let us now take a practical overview of what led to the transformation of a seemingly impossible utopia into a tangible and a very palpable reality.
In spite of the mass elation at the declaration of the results, experts in the highest echelon of global sociology were not overwhelmed. It had been all very obvious since February last year when the campaigning of both the parties were traversing the last laps of electioneering, that John McCain, the Republican candidate for the presidential race, was far from being a befitting contest to the young Illinois senator.
Not only was McCain trailing Obama on the ideological battle, where he pitted the clichéd agenda of experience and Vietnam War glory against the freshness of hope that his young rival endorsed, but he was also finding it difficult to make ends meet during the course of his political crusading. But how did a modest lawyer from Illinois, garner as big an election fund as a few billion dollars to pose a colossal challenge for as seasoned a veteran as senator McCain? This is where the significance of social media arises. Read on to get a clearer picture.
Social media, as the name suggests is a kind of a communication tool. It is an aggregation of online sites that are created by people who are interested in the exchange of views among a wide circle of individuals. It also goes by the name of Web2.0. It also means the same thing - this is a pedestal where people want to know as much about you as they are willing to share about themselves.
As such the cardinal assumption that this machinery of networking makes, is that people are inclined to interact and connect with each other. If engineered properly, this web instrument can open up wholly new and potential avenues for the promotion of your brand - something that Obama maneuvered with classic élan.
Social Media Marketing
The Internet has been the rage for almost a decade now. Gone are the days when people would condescendingly look down upon the Internet world as a time passer or a satellite devise to track ones high school pals.
Today the virtual world controls the pulse of all important nerve centers of the real world. Authors are using it for virtual book launches, it is indexing the movement of stock exchanges all around the globe, it has become the most important tool for communication, you name a field and it has been revolutionized by cyber networking. And one of the biggest innovations it has probably brought to the world of marketing.
Advertising was never so much fun and interesting. And it is this medley of avenues that social networking has set out to explore, which goes by the collective name of Social Media. So how is it that you can use this creation to market whatever it is that you want to sell? Read on to get the answer.
One thing you need to keep in mind is that, the social media only assists in promoting your brand as against creating it. It only acquaints people of your ambitions and goal in life as against being an aggressive sales portal. So before you log on to one of these sites ensure that you have a brand that has enough meat in it to arrest and sustain the attention of the web traffic you will be interacting with.
The social media is only fruitful till you can convince other people. According to Dr. Ben Mack, your brand is not the item that you put up for sale; instead it is a projection of that latent quality in your character, that should persuade them enough to be eventual buyers of whatever it is that you are selling.
What Obama did was he spread his message of change through his ‘brand’ vote for change; and in doing so, he used today’s most happening tool of communication - the internet, more specifically the social media. People all over the world liked his brand and bought the product he was offering a presidential term in the White House. They paid for it, by digging into the smallest savings they had as small as $1, $2, $5 etc. and contributed it to his electioneering funds. The rest as they say is history.
Now that we have got the basics of social media clear, let us now venture into its other interesting attributes.
·Social media is a veritable research tool.
As stated earlier, social media are great interaction junctions where one can learn about what people are excited about and what events are causing ripples in the societal circle. It can be about anything
·Social media can be an effective vehicle for pulling web traffic to ones’ site:
The main idea of a social media is to let people know of the services you have for them and in the process, identify the mass of people who really need what you have. Social bookmarking tools, social profile sites, social video sites are just some of the cardinal outlets that can draw massive traffic to your site, if you simply leave your weblinks with them. This assists in the exposition of your brand by establishing reciprocate links to your site and improves your position in the search engine results.
Social media used as a tool for the diversification of the audience base:
Once you have spread your message and your customers start flowing in, you now need to figure out how to sustain them, so that they can persuade other prospective customers to visit your website. This way you are expanding into a wider stretch of the customer base that would have probably been a problem to acquire otherwise.
Social media in marketing:
Only a fool will deny the immense power that the Internet exerts in the promotion of any type of businesses
Online networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, all have the same
·Something that is critically important when networking with other people is to stand out in the crowd owing to your personal signature style. You need to be beautifully etched in the memory of these people so that they instantly recognize you, when you get back to them for follow up. And how are you going to be that memorable experience to them? By trying to sell your product to them? They will resent ever meeting you, forget about remembering you. Always be an inspirational figure whom these people can fondly recollect and tell their friends and relatives about. Always try to help them in whatever ways you can.
·Don’t project yourself as an insensitive sales person on these networking portals. That includes not posting backlinks to your product, either on your Blog or on Twitter. Your sole aim should be to apprise the visitors of the attributes of your brand, nothing else.
·Be engaging. Again like real world interactions, people will despise your company if you fail to excite their attention. Be versatile. Express your views on matters of current significance that is shaping the world that we live in. If you have to be a bit controversial for this, don’t mind being so, as a bit of contention only peps up the reader’s interest in reading your blog regularly. Interact with the members of your industry or respond to the judgments of other individuals of your local community by offering them your insight on an issue.
·Your blog should offer enough substance for thought to your visitors. The content in your site need not always be genuine, but
they should serve one cardinal
·As it is important in the real life to follow up with a customer after the initial meeting, so it is with online marketing. Be in touch with your customer and keep them updated on the latest postings that you have made on your blog. It will only keep the interest of your customer alive and serve as an additional promotional medium for your product. Remember, the major way of spreading your brand name is by word of mouth. So the more impressed your customer is, the more people they will talk to about you.
Social media is a powerful tool for mass advertising. All you need is the technical awareness of how to use it in the best possible manner. Now that you know the social protocols that need to be adhered to while networking, let us educate you about the technical instruments at your disposal whose services you can make good of.
Social Media Optimization
Techniques
SMO or social media optimization is a system in which by using the attributes of search engine optimizations your web site is optimized amongst the most happening online communities. This can either be done by strewing links all across the community website to facilitate backlinking or by strengthening the interaction podium by writing numerous blogs and constantly updating their content. This will serve to recreate interest in your blogs amongst your regular visitors and have them coming back for more; though with additional company. This therefore is a more effective method of drawing traffic to your website.
So by now it is clear that if you have to popularize your brand you need to popularize your website. The guidelines below will simply help you a little in that endeavor.
Join a social media platform, for
Tag your article in the correct way to increase visibility. Don’t be stupid enough, to tag an article as Acne when it deals with the more specific issue of acne scars. Make your voice heard and opinion counted, by the tactful use of tagging.
Focus on quantity as much as you would on quality. Keep on adding articles and white pages so that you give your visitors more than enough to chew on. If you do not update your website regularly they will soon lose interest to visit your site in the long run. This tactic therefore assists in adding to the linkability of your website.
The most significant requirement is to provide for methods that simplify ‘tagging’ and ‘bookmarking’ for your customers. This can be done if you provide easy quick buttons or ‘add to del.icio.us’. Allow for tag lists and notes for links to cumulate visibility.
Reward the incoming links as a sort of inducement to make them come back for more. This will not only bring in the existing customers but also pull in more traffic, who would want to get rewarded as well.
Offer downloadable files from your website in the forms of downloadable pdf. files ,audio and video files and make them available to your customer either for free or at a negligible cost. An additional propaganda mechanism can be by sending their copies to various other websites.
Social media optimization has immense potential of escalating the ranking of your website to great heights. Let us now move over to the other technique of social media marketing.
So I hope by now you’re convinced of the power of social media marketing and also what’s it and how it works. If you’re determined to make it big this 2009, you must make full use of social media optimization. Indeed there are several social network sites only but in the next chapters, I have discussed about the top 7 social media namely – Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Myspace, linkedin, Squidoo, podcasts and how you can use each of these and generate more traffic to your business.
A lot of people undermine the power of Facebook as a marketing tool and relate to it as nothing but a time wasting exercise. It might be true of people who use it for tracing high school classmates or for playing brainless video games. But what about authors who use it to host virtual release parties? What about the non- governmental organizations that are raising massive donations for charitable causes using the same medium? It just goes on to affirm the old
The easiest way to make a Facebook profile work for you is by linking it back to your main website, online store, or wherever it is from where you desire to promote your product from. But there are other ways as well.
·A fan page is a page that can be created by anyone to admire absolutely anything that he feels is very arresting. It is a method of getting feed backs from other enthusiasts or
·Use the ‘GROUPS’ APPLICATION ON THE Facebook and make a group of interested and like minded visitors. This can also help in marketing your brand as you can promote yourself as an authority on the product that you are selling. Say you are in charge of a restaurant and project yourself as a gourmet and a food critic by hobby. You can then advice your visitors on which restaurant to check out for a particular cuisine and the details of new food joints that might have opened in your city. This way you can build up your reliability with the interactive functionality that this application offers.
·The bulletin application of the Facebook has an important application. It serves as an instant message board for all kinds of important announcements that you may need to make regarding a new product or a sale, or a new movie; which otherwise you probably had to let people know by calling them individually. It is also extremely helpful in connecting with your customers. Just post the details of all points of sale and the relevant URLs and see the increase in
The facebook is increasingly being hailed all around the world as an innovative and effective avenue for business marketing. So don’t let your business lag behind due to some irrational and baseless fears regarding the efficacy of the internet.
YouTube
The Latest Marketing Device: YouTube
If you have not already started using YouTube as one of your primary marketing devices then you are lagging behind in the path of the new marketing revolution that has taken over the online business community.
Marketing your product through videos made by you on YouTube is one of the most effective ways of advertising your product to potential customers. More and more people nowadays are becoming
If you own a travel agency then make videos of your last family vacation, make it visually creative with the help of the usual software programs available and post them on YouTube for everyone to see what they will gain if they come to your agency for their travel plans.
If you are promoting working individuals from home you should post the video of your son’s first steps that you were witness to, and had taken a video of. This is proof enough of the fact that more and more people will be able to experience such intimate personal moments with their loved ones if they work from home.
Before starting your YouTube promotion post an introductory video. This should contain convincing and relevant matter about why you decided to use YouTube as one of your main advertisement mediums. This should be good enough to convince more people to use YouTube as their marketing medium.
The best part about using YouTube to post videos containing campaign matter about your product or business is that you can accomplish all this at no cost at all. You can shoot your own video at your own convenience. You can edit and post it with the help of your own handy cam, PC and Internet connection without shedding a single penny for the entire process. And in return for all this you get to widen your marketing base by reaching out to all those who check out videos on YouTube.
These videos generate more traffic to the original product website when people click on them. In this way, your website will also become more popular. You can upload more than one video on YouTube and check out which one is generating more traffic among web browsers. Depending on this analysis you can post more videos or take off the ones that are not as popular as others.
The Basics of Using YouTube:
People use YouTube to advertise their product like they would use any other marketing medium to do the same. Therefore, the basics of trade remain the same in this case even if the concept is more dynamic and advantageous. While posting videos of your product or business you must keep in mind certain things in order to grab the right attention from browsers.
Make sure that you video is relevant to your product. Do not include useless information to add fluff to the content. Keep it simple and matter of fact.
Include real life analogies to the use of your product if possible. This makes the whole appearance real and more convincing.
Do not go by the rules of advertisement that you had learned back in the B- schools. Most web browsers treat YouTube as a source of information; something like Wikipedia. Therefore, if your video is about models flashing smiles at the camera complete with cheesy lines, then this advertisement is no better than the ones on TV. The whole point of using YouTube as a medium of marketing is to make it different. And this difference comes out of keeping it real.
Make sure that the sound recording quality is a good one. No one likes muffled audio while watching a video. And if this is about advertising for your business, then bad sound quality can be a killer.
Whoever is starring in this video- be it you or someone else of your choice- should be convincing in his or her appearance. This is not about looking your best. This is about making others believe in the best. Therefore, designer clothes do not matter as much as having a witty script, a comfortable smile and an excitable look. These social qualities attract more viewers than you know of.
Take care of the lighting of the video. Most of the time amateurs shooting the videos do not understand the significance of good lighting. A dark setting can make the viewer lose interest very easily. Therefore, to at least make your video good enough for someone to sit through you have to make sure that there is adequate light on the sets.
Talk about your business or your product clearly. Although this is about informing potential consumers about the product, there is no point in talking in riddles to them. Therefore, be articulate and sure about what you are conveying to the viewer.
It is okay to have a less than perfect video for YouTube. The process improves with practice. And after a few video shoots you will realize that your later videos are of much better quality than the initial ones. Therefore, don’t worry about anyone judging your advertisement content based on your video shooting skills.
What is Twitter?
If you want to let others know of your daily activities, Twitter will help to you do the same in the bets way possible. Although some may wonder about the point of letting others know of what we do in our personal space, but it is believed to have the ability to generate market value for your business by finding solutions to that very same query.
At first Twitter may seem like any other instant messaging gadget. It works the best for those who have a wide range of interests and activities.
How Does it Work
Twitter is instantly accessible. It connects you to a much wider geographic social base than your neighborhood or the college cultural community. Due to more and more people using the Internet to stay in touch with others as well as getting to know new people, Twitter is the best way to do all of this.
Maybe according to you your interests, activities and habits are only for your family, friends and colleagues to know. But that is not the case in reality. People are way better connected today through the Internet than they were a few years back.
You can interact with those individuals who share a common interest with you but might be living half way across the world. You would never have known of each others’ existence had it not been for a device such as Twitter.
You can find out which URL is of the most interest to you by using Twitter to get to the bottom of this. While searching for your most favorite URL remember that websites contain content, but 2.0 sites don’t. Therefore, you have to use specific URLs for Twitter to do its work.
If you want to find out what subject interests you the most in any field Twitter will find this out for you as well. You can also find others who share the same taste and interact with them to receive updates regarding the topic under discussion as well as share your information on the topic with them.
If you want to receive and send tweets to those living near you about common interests and activities, you can do so through Twitter. In this way you can stay connected with all those who indulge in similar habits as your own both near and far.
Using Twitter to Make a Difference
If you want to make contact with people who make a difference regarding your interests and hobbies you can search them out on Twitter.
In order to find someone worthwhile to keep a close watch on you need to see if they have posted anything that they have created on their own or not. If they are ones who only re post others’ content then there is no point wasting your time on these individuals.
Following such people and their posted content can help you in gaining useful information about various subjects of your interest.
On the flipside, if you are one of those who post useful original content on the Internet and use Twitter to improve your connections socially then there will be many followers who will worship you for your content.
Remember that when you are posting content regarding issues that are important to you, there are others out there who are also following this content regularly. Therefore, whenever you post such content make sure you send tweets to all those who are your followers and others who would want to join this list.
Make sure that your content is original and useful for those who are reading it. If you find something on whatever you are interested in suddenly, then make sure you let others following the same topic as well, through Twitter.
Your content can be through Facebook, a webpage you may have designed, a blog you may have written or even videos and pictures that you may taken. The topics can be varied and the content matter can be as quirky and strange as you wish them to be.
But always remember that by posting such content on Twitter you are influencing the thought process and opinions of thousands around you who take an interest in the same topic. Therefore, be careful of what you post to whom. You want to let people know that you believe in something and that you are willing to do something about it instead of just speculating or arguing about it. Therefore, this will be a sort of inspiration for those who also want to join a cause that they believe in or a petition for some change that they want.
Be creative with your content. Present it as you want to. Do not conform to any typical idea. Make the content interesting for those who are following it.
Why Should We Use Twitter?
If you want to know what your contemporaries are thinking about, or what they are doing about these thoughts to bring about positive changes in the society
then Twitter is one of the most effective media to do this. Not only will you be exposed to a variety of information on a host of issues, but you will also be able to interact with those who are posting these things and are acting about these beliefs and causes.
Not only will this be a way for you to contribute to the cause that you believe in, but it will also keep you connected with your peers. It is obvious that change can be brought about only when a community stands united in its front. Twitter presents itself as a channel for this community to act and interact.
Therefore, do not waste any more time and use all the information, trivia and notes that you have collected about various issues that may interest others like you and put them up on Twitter and wait for it to become the topic of discussion on the forum within moments. In this way you will know what the general opinion about your topic is. You can work on your issue accordingly or even gather support of those who are in favor of this in order to bring about a vital change.
Twitter is a medium of communication provided to anyone and everyone who is involved in issues involving the society, economy, politics, and subjects of every other kind that one can think of. This is a medium to put one’s word across to others and make a statement. If you have this opportunity in front of, the best is to grab it and make full use of it.
Myspace
Myspace is an extremely beneficial tool that is increasingly being used to communicate with millions of people all over the world to facilitate exchange of ideas and the formation of newer alliances. It could be long distance friendships, business partnerships, a forum on shared interests etc.
As such it doesn’t require any further exposition to show how, if employed in the right way, this social networking tool can draw in colossal amounts of web traffic to your site and market your product in a scale that you never imagined was possible even in your most wishful dreams. But for that to become reality you need to fall in line with certain guidelines. Are you ready? Alright, buckle
Here we go!
·Make loads of friends:
After all that’s what social networking sites are meant for, right? Forging new bonds and renewing old ones. So when you sign up, include as many friends in your site as possible. Don’t discriminate on grounds whether they can convert into potential customers or not. The more crowded your site remains the more credibility it will garner and the more popular it is going to be.
·Be active:
Talk, respond, reciprocate. Be alive when people communicate with you. Leave back your remarks on the pages of your friends who have visited your page and tried to touch base with you. However silly they may be.
For example complement someone on the new puppy that she got or on a more reasonable note, congratulate someone on their new job. Show your appreciation to a poetry that someone may have posted on your page. Do anything but convince your friends that your are not a log of wood.
·Make your page your personal signature:
Be very cautious about not styling your page in a clichéd layout. Offer newer, fresher designs that your visitors had not seen before. Such personal customizing is done by companies like Cybertrack Marketing.com. And it also comes with the additional advantage that these companies are also going to market your page adding to your page’s popularity. Just keep the outline neat and well scripted and yet retain the element of delight and see the traffic thong your site.
·Concentrate on targeting your niche audience: yes you started off by opening the door to all and sundry but now, that you have created a respectable customer base it is time for locating prospective customers. So start researching. Sort your friends’ list according to any of the given classifications
Restrain from being an aggressive sales person as that might result in their shunning you away. Be attentive to their interests and encourage the same in them towards you. It is only when they start feeling comfortable in your company that they are going to consider looking at your merchandise.
Another excellent but very occasionally used social networking tool, LinkedIn has been unable to replicate the success of many of its contemporaries. So there is no uniformity of purpose to which it is put.
Some use it for finding friends who share their common interest, while some professionals use it as a podium to recruit people. Small and medium business ventures use it for searching others who are in the same practice. But again, used properly it has fantabulous prospects of promoting your venture.
Very much like Facebook, the only point of difference that LinkedIn displays is that it is more serious in its approach towards your life. Just as in Facebook you would be involved in a lot of frivolous chilling out like beating a celebrity hollow log; in LinkedIn you take a more serious look at life. It serves as a strong runway for your life’s ambitions to take off from. Three of its most cardinal benefits are:
·BRAND CREATION:
The phrase is an extremely loaded one that speaks volumes about you and also acts as a memento for your acquaintances to remember you by. So what is it? It is that latent quality in you that never changes. Say, your gait, or the way you dress or the unmistakable swishing of your hair when you talk; the way you stay quiet when you become very
So when you provide your photograph in the LinkedIn column, ensure that it expresses your goals in life. It can be a formal photo if you desire to project yourself as a
The column that expects you to draft a summary about yourself can be a veritable goldmine if written carefully; and the same goldmine can collapse and choke your reputation if you try to misuse it. There are two cardinal rules when dealing with this section. Don’t fake who you are and be concise, to the point. If you are promoting acne creams, no one wants to know whether you love pets or not.
Provide relevant data relating to your nature,
And last but not the least; provide just as much information about yourself that is a direct linkage to the aims that you have set for yourself. Don’t irritate people with useless information that are not associated in any way.
·LIKE MINDS TO LIKE MINDS EVER TEND, AN UNIVERSAL LAW:
LinkedIn is an amazing platform to discover loads of people who may share an interest of yours that you thought was strange. You can find groups of almost anything at LinkedIn; they can as varied as bird watchers, knitting and crocheting addicts, food critics, travel maniacs, book worm, PTA groups, almost anything under the sun.
Socializing with a group that you are in the same intellectual parallel with has immense benefits when it comes to promoting your product with all the new people. All that you do, is to go to the upper left corner of your home page and click on the section ‘group’ and then you can happily browse through the list of ‘fraternities’ who share very strange interests and decide what suits you most.
Initially simply reply to their enquiries about your whereabouts or hobbies or whatever question they pose for you; you can also simply complement an aspect you found interesting in them. Slowly as confidence builds up, you can get down interacting more freely.
·PUBLICITY:
Remember the underlying objective of joining LinkedIn is to promote yourself or the services that you have to offer and find takers for the same. So don’t leave any stones unturned in your efforts to make your profile look interesting and engaging.
Employ the requisite links that LinkedIn provides you with to promote these ends. Upload a
you elaborate on the goals of your life, or explain what kind of a job you are looking for and what qualities do you have to suit such a job profile.
LinkedIn is all about you, so you better ensure that whatever picture you have drawn of yourself over there is extremely riveting.
You could also use the application that allows you to make slide presentations that act as a flowchart to educate your visitor about who you are, what your aims are and what are your short time goals. This forms for extremely interesting viewing when contrasted with mundane scripting of paragraphs on your home page. You can also use graphics and pictures to add to the charm factor. Bullet points are also effective in keeping the attention of your reader alive.
Squidoo
Squidoo is another social networking site that is finding a lot of favor with the majority of web traffic. Every web page in Squidoo is called a
As much it is no surprise that squidoo can prove very effective in promoting your product only if you can pull in considerable web traffic. Since Google shows a marked bias for squidoo web pages, they have a very high ranking on the results generated by the former search engine.
As such, if you have a blog or website with squidoo, you can very easily market them with minimum effort. What you can do is that you can attract traffic and popularize your product with the masses using squidoo and then you can redirect the same mass of enthusiast to external web pages. Squidoo also comes with a couple of additional perks as well. First of all, creating an account with squidoo comes for free; and second squidoo allows you to sell or affiliate products, something other networking sites hardly permit.
Squidoo lenses are extremely informative and full of fresh content. So make sure that you do a lot of research before you post your webpage for public viewing. And once your page is on squidoo lens you can rest assured that it is going to fetch the top rankings in major search engine results. But for freshly created lenses a bit o optimization always helps to increase its visibility.
So here are some ways in which a Squidoo lens can help to increase the visibility of your website…
·It is a powerful podium that penetrates newer customer bases, every day. The secret is that a squidoo lens features so high in search result rankings that a constant stream of fresh web traffic is never a problem.
·Setting up a squidoo lens doesn’t require any complex knowledge of quantum physics. It is simple and can be established in some extremely simple steps. It is user friendly and extremely helpful. It even helps you in developing your content and making it more engaging. It has features like RSS feed importer, the
·The biggest advantage of squidoo is that once it starts generating considerable web traffic, you can redirect them to external web sites that you may own with other networking sites; or say your independent blog. This is what makes squidoo an obvious choice with marketing professionals.
·Search engine optimization is another feather in the crown of this efficient social networking organ. Squidoo is a safe bet when it comes to marketing your website, both on the internet as well as search engines. A factor that critically determines the popularity of a website is the ease with which back links can be created from them to other websites.
Squidoo excels at this. Squidoo allows you to establish back links with any other websites of your choice with the minimum difficulty. This has the net result that you can jam the bulk of this traffic to your alternative websites that might be promoting other goods or services.
·Affiliate marketing - another of Squidoo’s unique advantage. Affiliate marketing requires its affiliate marketers to promote other people’s products. What happens is this - when you sign up for an affiliate marketing program - by choosing from the list of best affiliate programs that are available online - you enter into a contract with a merchant, to publish advertisement links of his products on your website.
When the visitors of your website, click on that ad link they are lead to the merchant site and if there they make a final purchase, you get a commission on sales. So where does squidoo come in?
Squidoo is one of the few social networking sites that allow affiliate links, as most social networking sites don’t. So on one hand it draws in traffic and on the other it retraces their course and leads them straight back to your merchant’s home pages.
And imagine the amount you would make in commissions, even if half of this bulk is convinced enough to buy your retailer’s product. And if that’s not enough incentive, for starting your affiliate business ad doing it on Squidoo, let me furnish another small piece of information. Some merchant sites give you as high a commission rate as 90% of the total cost of the product.
Squidoo offers you so many varied kinds of benefits that you cannot afford miss it. All you need to do is, spend some quality time optimizing your lens. Even here squidoo is right at your service. Use the website marketing lens on squidoo that provides for better methods of promoting your websites.
So put in that little bit of extra effort and take advantage of the state of the art online marketing innovations and take your websites to colossal heights of popularity.
Podcasts
Although you may think that the term podcasting is simply an amalgamation of the words iPod and broadcasting, it means and does more than that. Any audio device that is capable of playing an MP3 file can be used for podcasting.
Therefore, podcasting should be defined better for wider understanding.
Even if you have no idea what podcasting is you should find out more about this new technology and what it can do. Because, it truly can accomplish quite a bit. Recent developments in technology has made podcasting a useful way of sharing information.
Most people would know that iPod is a storage device designed by Apple Inc. that can store music, video and podcasts. But what many do not know is that even without an ipod one can indulge in podcasting. The fact that iPod is a part of the term podcast is simply coincidental, and advantageous for Apple.
Although you can use many file formats for podcasting the most commonly used one is MP3. MP3 is a file format used for audio files so that a lot of data can be stored without taking up too much space. This is the primary reason for it to be used in audio files so extensively.
Podcasts basically consist of audio files broadcasted on the Internet. Most people think of downloading music and storing it onto their iPod and listen to it anytime they want to. But podcasting is not only functional on an iPod. It can be used on other devices as well. Anything that is MP# friendly can be used for podcasting.
If you think it is the same as downloading music and listening to them on your MP3 player then you are mistaken. Podcasting allows the audio files to come to you instead of you looking out for them. This happens via file syndication and RSS feed. If you register yourself to a podcasting website then it becomes a lot simpler for you to attain the music of your choice daily on your podcasting device.
Instead of only storing it on the hard disk of your computer you can also transfer the podcast files onto your mobile music device to listen to music anytime, anywhere. Some of these devices have software programs installed in them that allow them to recognize podcast files when connected to the Internet via a computer so that they can automatically transfer the files onto the device. This makes it more convenient to listen to music whenever you want to without having to connect to the Internet or using the computer to have access to them.
Podcasting has made audio broadcasting much more portable. This allows circulation of information and ideas from people to people. Most people working in the entertainment field use podcasts to distribute information to one another through podcasts. You can also use it to share educational content if you are a student. And journalists use it to get their work done more easily.
The time is not too far when podcasts will be followed by video casting.
Here’s a list of sites you can submit your podcasts to:
Conclusion and Social Media
Marketing Strategy
Anyone who indulges in marketing must have a plan to follow before anything else. In social media marketing you also need to know what to do and when to do it in order to succeed in it. You can use social media marketing in order to build the market for a new product or you can strengthen the already existing customer base of an old product. You can also use it to enhance your PR. But if you do not have a plan to do all of this, then you will not be able to work it out.
Whether you are marketing via facebook or twitter or using podcasts, read through the following pointers in order to use social media marketing effectively. You are free to add any of your own ideas to enhance the structure as well.
•First find out who you want to reach out to. Your target audience will decide your social media marketing strategy.
•Now jot down what exactly you want to convey to your target audience. If you want to introduce a new product then your actions shall be quite different from what you should have done if you want to widen your customer base of an already existing product.
•Decide on how you want to keep track of your advertisement results. You can use ad trackers or click counts on your website.
•It is important that you keep track of your competitors in the field. How they are using social media marketing to promote their business is essential to keep tabs on so that you can counter or enhance on them accordingly.
•Decide on which mode of content you want to use for your marketing strategy: video, audio or write ups.
•You also need to take into account what you are offering your customers when they look through your advertisement content. Convincing material is responsible for converting potential customers into actual consumers of your product.
•Take care of which social media tools you want to use to promote your products. You can use Facebook, YouTube or Twitter to accomplish this. It’s always intelligent to plan it out before acting upon the advertisement.
•Think about how you are going to keep your social media marketing updated. This may require you to hire marketing professionals or use certain software
programs that will require a minimum investment from your side. This is inevitable if you want to have a functional marketing strategy benefiting your business.
• Do not underestimate the power of the word. You will be surprised at the volume of publicity you may receive by simply having people talk about your social media marketing strategy. Therefore, let as many people know about your plans as you can so that more people know about your marketing activities.
If you can plan adequately and execute it with equal style then you will be able to successfully market your business to a wide base of potential consumers. This is your ultimate path to success of your business.
No comments:
Post a Comment