All marketing plans, efforts and strategies revolve around people and understanding the potential customer or catering to the existing customer is the main focus of any marketing campaign.
The social element can never be ruled out from any business activity as a whole because every business caters to some or the other want or requirement of people.
As all people involved in any kind of marketing are aware of the four Ps - Product , Place, Promotion and Price. We can see that we cannot decide about the product without keeping the people in mind, we cannot decide about the place without keeping the people in mind, we cannot decide about any promotion campaign without keeping the people in mind and again the price also is a people centric decision.
Hence, it is this fifth ‘P' people which is the main aspect around which all marketing campaigns revolve around. Hence, every business needs to reach out to people with the best possible approach.
Internet marketing offers the best possible platform for reaching out to the potential customer for introducing the products and services or to the existing customer for customer support in the form of social media.
According to Wikipedia:
Social media are media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media use web-based technologies to transform and broadcast media monologues into social media dialogues. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content." Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM). A common thread running through all definitions of social media is a blending of technology and social interaction for the co-creation of value.
Hence social media sites offer a two way conversational platform which offers a fair opportunity to voice opinions and feedbacks to both the parties involved .
There are many social media sites but Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube and Blogs are widely used by the netizens. These sites are a good tool for effective online marketing and networking.
If your business has an account on these social media sites it becomes very easy and convenient to keep yourself updated about the latest buzz related to your industry, the interaction on this platform helps you to create an online brand and reputation which in the long run will help in generating a WOM for your company as online reputation management is the off shoot of the success of these social media sites.
No doubt this media offers a global reach in the most cost effective way but there are certain things to bear in mind when we have a social media presence.
There should be a team or a single person responsible to manage the media. i.e there has to be a sense of responsibility and answerability to every post or tweet , one has to distinguish between relating online on a personal basis and a formal basis. When you are dealing with a client the language and approach have to be very thought off as every post and tweet gets recorded and the company has to stand by the spoken word especially when you are dealing with customer complaint online or a grievance.
Just like every drop in the ocean counts everything you write on social media keeps on adding to your brand value and online reputation hence every word counts.
SEO has got its own importance and Social media has got its own importance. Since Social media has been integrated by search and real time search is where people go if they want to know what people are saying about a certain topic as of now, SEO and social media have to be used in conjunction by all the companies for a long term qualitative online presence for their business. Both these sources bring in qualitative, targeted inbound traffic which is the main purpose of online marketing.
