Social media marketing, sometimes shortened to the less clear ‘social marketing’, has not been around long. Social media was touted as the newest, best way to reach out to your customers back when the entire concept was being called ‘web 2.0’, but it hasn’t been until recently that the whole thing really started making money for small and medium-sized businesses.
If you are thinking about dipping your metaphorical toes into the social media marketing pool, here are 3 things you might not know, but you really need to.
Social media marketing isn’t free.
Social marketing may seem free at first – your business’ social media accounts are free and you don’t have to pay to interact with your markets there (though you can). However, it is not without cost.
A good social marketing campaign requires a lot of time and effort from your staff, and there is a fairly steep learning curve at the beginning. Paying a full-time social marketing specialist a wage isn’t ‘zero cost’, after all. Even contracting out to a marketing agency to do all the account-monitoring and actual interactions costs something. In time, your success may demand a larger social marketing team, and proportionally higher costs.
Though it isn’t free, social marketing is much less expensive than traditional marketing techniques.
Compared to the cost of print advertising or more tried-and-true internet marketing methods, social marketing is very very cheap. But cheap isn’t the whole story. It comes down, as most things do, to ROI – How much reach, frequency and exposure you get for every dollar you spend.
You’ll find that, unless you are absolutely doing it wrong, social media marketing hits all these metrics and just about any others you might care to use very efficiently. I did mention a learning curve, and you can’t expect the best performance right away if your people aren’t experienced, but even with a rooking SM team, you should see a lot more results for every dollar you spend on SM than on traditional marketing.
The real value comes from interactions, not views
Social media marketing is a different beast form traditional advertising. It is not just a new channel, but an entirely new country where you need to think differently to thrive.
If your social media marketing campaign got your message and brand story in front of 10,000 new people…. Good. That is important, and it probably cost a lot less to achieve than you could have done otherwise. But you are leaving a lot on the table if you stop there. SM marketing lets you interact meaningfully with your market. They can do something about your message, and other people can see them do it. This alone is powerful, but the SM sites and search engines love interactions, and will push the content that causes people to respond. A like is great. A share is better. A comment is better still, and a comment that spawns a discussion is pure gold.
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