Social Media Marketing

Social media is a new outstanding channel that companies use to reach their customers. Millions of people are spending their time on social networks to communicate. Most companies saw the oppurtunity to reach a new and effective way to reach those people.In order to be in customer’s minds, brands need to be where their customers are. The importance of TV commercials starts to fall off. New areas such as Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed for advertising emerged. It is also relatively less costly than TV commercials. Nowadays, since knowing social media trends and applications is important for marketing, I chose this topic.
Julie Wright,president of (W)right On Comminications, a communications and consulting firm with offices in California and British Columbia, says, “The biggest advantages social networking tools offer are their ability to target markets extremely narrowly, produce real-time feedback and resuldts, and generate word-of-mouth.” If you know your real target group so you can choose your own social media to focus on. You have to know where your target audience hang out on internet. For example, Facebook have a younger population than Twitter.People use MySpace for entertainment purposes. Linkedin is a channel for B2B marketers. Youtube gives oppurtunity to brands to share their video messages to audience if they want to see what is new about your brand. And also, Twitter is more viral effective and fast-moving channel than facebook. Brands create fan pages to update their loyal customers for their news.
However, it is not enough to create a fan page and leave it. You have to give an interesting content to keep your followers to engage your fan page. Since all of your brands fans and followers are one click away from un-fanning or un-following, you have to choose a decent strategy, spend a significant time and create a interesting content for them to catch their attention.
Julie Wright also explains,” The reason these tools are becoming essential to business communications is that word-of-mouth continues to be perceived as more credible than paid messages.” People use this websites to collect ideas and recommendations. Just like we do by gathering somewhere outside to socialize to eachother and share our lives to our friends, colleagues and peers, social mesia make it more easier and more affordable. Wrigt says, “140 characters(the maximum length of a Tweet) is highly efficient and focused communication that actually be a more convenient way to stay in touch and connected with your network than seeing folks a few times a year at trade shows or conferences – and it’s alot more affordable!”
A new job title emerged social media experts who studies social network trends and communication applications for brands. Companies spend thousands maybe millions of dollars for social media consultants. And many companies shifts their marketing activities from TV to social networks. Here some statistics from Facebook:
· More than 350 million active users
· Average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook
· More than 1.6 million active Pages on Facebook
An for Twitter:
eMarketer.com states, “In 2009, there will be 18 million US adults who access Twitter on any platform at least monthly. That represents a 200% increase over 2008 levels. Usage will reach 26 million US adults in 2010, a further 44.4% climb.”

These numbers illustrate a little how big enough the social media is and how much people spend their time on social networks and make social media attractive channel for marketers all over the world .
Every marketing professional should learn using social media effectively for being successfull on their sector. There are many of researches and articles about this topic on internet and on print materials.

REFERENCES
Foster, J.. (2009, November). SOCIAL MEDIA: Communicate The Important Stuff. Agency Sales, 39(10), 52-55. Retrieved January 11, 2010, from ABI/INFORM Global. (Document ID: 1917048261).
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007271
http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics


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