Understanding Social Media

Recently Brand Advance was referred to a growing author and successful business man to generate buzz and awareness for his upcoming book and tour. After several interactions with him it was clear that he was viewing social media as traditional “push” marketing. The points below were articulated to him in an email…specific aspects of the email relative to his business were stripped away for this post, however I thought it would still be beneficial to share this information as it may help others better understand social media and how it can help grow their business.

  1. Social media is not sales
  2. Social media creates an environment for sales to happen, but social media itself is not sales. If you go into a social setting and “sell” it is frowned upon. Selling in social media is like pushing your products in church…People go to church, just like social sites, for a purpose and it’s very interrupting to “Sell” and push a message at them…It’s better to engage with them and participate in conversations. This doesn’t mean that you won’t meet and start your relationship with your best and most profitable customers at church.

  3. Word of mouth marketing is the most powerful form of marketing
  4. When people make a purchasing decision they often ask others what their experience has been with that brand or person through a social interaction. Think of social media as Word of mouth on steroids. There are over 400 million people on facebook and millions on twitter…talking with friends, associates and family members. Crafting a solid social media campaign with a little oomph can spread this Word of mouth of your brand virally throughout each person’s social circle.

  5. Growing Awareness & Respectability is Key
  6. The key to social media is connecting with people through content and meaningful interactions and revealing your expertise and thought leadership in the process. Once people know and respect you as an expert in what you do increased business and sales will follow. Think about Donald Trump, his personal brand is synonymous with business success (even though he has failed many times, as most successful people have). But the key is when Donald Trump puts out a book, tie or anything else with his name attached sales will often follow because people are aware of his his brand.

    Which brings me to my next point….

  7. Build a community
  8. People often buy from people or brands they have a relationship with. Building up a community of loyal and engaged advocates will never hurt. It’s called herd marketing….Once you have a herd (engaged audience) you can lead them where you see fit. Part of this is building your communication touch points and customer contact information….Facebook, twitter and email addresses.

  9. Social Media ROI
  10. If people are engaging with your brand and spreading the word through their social circle you’re getting far more value from a well crafted social media campaign then “traditional advertising”. Social media is also not measured like typical advertising…We can measure it on a profit and loss statement…but as mentioned social media is not sales, it creates an environment for sales to happen and helps you connect with your current and potential customers to break through the clutter. You measure ROI for social media over time on the overall company profit and loss statement, because it’s difficult to measure where a specific sale generated from word of mouth actually came from. In social media you measure the word of mouth, communication with the brand, shares, web traffic and other key performance indicators.


If you have any additional ways that you feel help people to better understand social media feel free to leave a comment below.

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can take advantage of social media to help grow your business feel free to give us a call. Our team offers a free initial consultation and would be happy to assist you in finding success through social media.

David

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109 Comments

  1. I’ve seen no other comments brought into any of the blogs I’m managing that have come from other discussion sites. I haven’t really troubleshot it yet, but I figured that as a new feature that perhaps it was just still under development.

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  15. Hi Colleen, well you’ve definitely hit some of the big names. I recommend them all, actually. I would also encourage that you read something crazy, like The Question Concerning Technology and other essays by Heidegger.

  16. A point very well made Josh. Social media sites are meant for you to socialize and build a network. Spamming them only harms your credibility which is what you were trying to build up in the first place.

  17. Interesting article! I quite agree with you that “Building and designing a successful social media campaign can be a lot like designing and building a skyscraper”…. it does requires constant maintainance.

  18. Really good post Jennifer. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head really – having a social media presence ‘just for the sake of it’ can be really harmful to a business.

  19. I couldn’t agree more with this post. We rely heavily on our employees to be attracting, engaging, and recruiting good candidates. They do this via social media and it has helped us win the talent war time after time.

  20. Social media is definitely hard to master depending on what side you are on. For the user, its easy to understand, but for the marketer, it might be a little bit harder to understand, and for the PR media person…. well… that’s a toss up, lol as some of them don’t seem to know what they are doing, while others excel at leveraging social media.

    Till then,

    Jean

  21. Agree with “E Michelson” that those measures are quite ambiguous. If we can find a method to measure purchase intention and consumer intention behavior, it would serve as a better measurement gauge.

  22. I think that 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.

  23. I would also encourage that you read something crazy, like The Question Concerning Technology and other essays by Heidegger. Or On The Internet by Hubert Dreyfuss. They don’t at first seem relevant, but I guarantee they will a) blow your mind and b) inspire you! Too bad you missed it! Maybe next time.

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  26. Thank you kindly for this report. I’m a primary admin on the Social Media Club – Cleveland and will be sharing on our Facebook ‘Fan’ page (somehow ‘like’ page is just… wrong). Love your website, too, and will share it as well and gather you into my RSS Feed. Thanks for sharing

  27. Social media has become the part and parcel of our daily lives. But one thing that you pointed in here that social media is not an advertising tool, and businesses should understand that

  28. social media is a important marketing tool and its really help to online business and we get more awarness about social media in whole world its really nice to know about everyone..

  29. Social media’s integration into the workplace is an exponentially growing trend yet many businesses are choosing to block social networking sites to employees.

  30. Very good article and good introduction about SMO. But, is there any optimization for social media that we post? As we have something like SEO where real optimization techniques are discussed, it will be really good if you can give us light on some Optimization techniques for Social Media.

  31. We have been working on Developing SMM products for the last three years and arrived at similar results. The Brand recall is highest when you have friends interacting with a brand..

  32. One characteristic shared by both social media and industrial media is the capability to reach small or large audiences; for example, either a blog post or a television show may reach zero people or millions of people.

  33. I have never really been influenced by the ads on facebook and have asked many of my FB friends if they have and I got the same answer. I these ads are ignored by a huge portion of social media users. We are so overloaded with ads we tune them out.

  34. I need to write an essay on the topic of “Social Media” but i need some help in completely understanding in detail the positves of these social mediums. If anyone can help me or provide infomation i would be grateful

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  36. I’m a primary admin on the Social Media Club – Cleveland and will be sharing on our Facebook ‘Fan’ page (somehow ‘like’ page is just… wrong). Love your website, too, and will share it as well and gather you into my RSS Feed.

  37. Social media is really a best method to achieve your prospective and existing clients with full transparency. I’m fairly much pleased with your excellent perform.You place actually very useful data. Preserve it up.thanks..

  38. With social media being a prominent mode to gain popularity, companies streamline their efforts to build an entire presence through twitter, facebook & other popular social media outlets.

  39. Social media is a great way to get more traffic but unless the traffic tends to be low quality traffic which does not convert and has a high bounce rate.

  40. The capability to reach small or large audiences; for example, either a blog post or a television show may reach zero people or millions of people.

  41. We continually use testing and metric tools to see if the words/ actions coincide. Real people moving people is true, but it’s not always due to product use and experience.

  42. With social media being a prominent mode to gain popularity, companies streamline their efforts to build an entire presence through twitter, facebook & other popular social media outlets

  43. Awesome tips for all. Social media is a best service for internet marketing. It changed that. It’s pushed us a step back when we consider tracking and analytics. Thanks for it.

  44. The resources you have provided has helped me in my social monitoring report so much! This is so vital for businesses to fully understand their customers’ thoughts, ideas, opinons, etc about their product. My social monitoring topic: Verizon and At&t

  45. Media means any message communicate with the public ex: Newspaper, film industry(holly,bolly,golly), etc., In this Media Violence , full of terrorism, not sensored can act as a social changes.

  46. A lot of people confuse social media with “spam media” – ie just blast people on twitter with your “deals” 24/7 and you will get someone to notice. Such a waste of resources and such a shame.

    Thanks for this article David.

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