Tag: social media marketing

Social media marketing is vital for every business professional. The Internet is, after all, a social medium in which people interact. Stimulating interactivity is the key to attracting interest to a product or service.

I’ve always viewed message boards as the original form of social media. Web sites that host their own message board forums are able to build a dedicated group of customers. Popular forum software applications include phpBB and vBulletin.

I’ve built on-site and off-site message boards for companies, and I’ve found that they generate large amounts of traffic and sales.

The key is to treat a message board like an affiliate program. Offer your members incentives to participate. For example, give out free T-shirts or other items to the member who reaches 300 posts within a specific period of time.

It’s also a good idea to offer rewards to members who refer new message board registrants. There are plenty of affiliate tracking solutions that can be used to facilitate this process. Get started today.

Understanding how groups of people interact with each other and disseminate information to each other is the key to leveraging the power of social media marketing.

On social networks, people often interact with each other to share ideas about how to solve problems. If your particular product or service happens to provide a solution to an ongoing problem, that will give you an opening for mentioning it.

When you think about it, the Internet is a problem-solving tool. When Web users type search queries into the major portals like Google and Yahoo, they’re invariably looking for a solution to a problem. Why? Because life is conflict. Conflict is what ties all information together and makes it relevant.

Source: ReveNews.com

I like David Berkowitz’s post on Social Media Insider about “CPSA” because it prompts an important discussion about pricing models.

In proposing the possibility of “CPSA” – Cost Per Social Action – Berkowitz recognizes the fact that “social networking, when done right, achieves something much different” from the current pricing models, Cost Per Impression (CPM), Cost Per Click (CPC), and Cost Per Action (CPA). Cost Per Engagement (CPE) gets closer, says Berkowitz, but still falls short. Read more…

Source: Revenews.com

First, social / experiential marketing doubters must be given the chance to appreciate how the Web is radically shifting power away from them and toward customers.  As a result, customers actively ignore and distrust advertising… and the marketers that push it.

Think about it — how many times do we hear about the latest trend in advertising which involves disguising ads to look less like ads?  In fact many believe that’s what social technologies should be used for (they call this aimless tactic that insults customers’ intelligence “branded entertainment”).

Read more about social marketing…