Online Marketing Strategies from MarketerInsight

Although relatively new, social media and social networking have become integral to Internet marketing. If you are considering using this new marketing channel, but don’t know where or how to begin, then it may be helpful to learn how to develop a social media marketing strategy.

Developing a Social Media Marketing Strategy: Where to Begin…

Define Your Social Media Marketing Goals. What are the goals of your organization? Do you want to build your brand and increase the number of targeted visitor to your website? Do you want to improve communication among customers, employees and other stakeholders? Do you want to strengthen your relationships and increase profitability? Determining exactly what you want to accomplish through a social media strategy will drive prioritization of your actions.

Define Your Social Media Marketing Initiatives. How can you use social media marketing and social networking to improve how a particular function is performed or how the entire organization performs? List appropriate programs, initiatives and projects that rely on social media and social networking and how they relate to your business goals. For example if you

Implement and Evaluate. Once you have begun your social media marketing and networking strategy, you can begin to evaluate how it is meeting your organizations’ goals. Interaction and engagement are key elements of building trust in a brand. The beauty of social media marketing is the opportunity it offers for the interaction and engagement that customers desire today.

Consider the amazing growth of the following:

FaceBook: In 2007, Facebook had an estimated 65 million users, a 120% increase over the previous year. It was the seventh most visited site worldwide with an average of 250,000 new registrations per day. More than half of active users return daily for at least 20 minutes per visit, racking up 65 billion page views per month.

MySpace:More than 300 million users visited MySpace in 2007, an increase of 4% over the previous year. It is the fifth most visited site worldwide, averaging 320,000 new registrations per day.

YouTube:Every day, more than 100 million YouTube videos are played. Approximately 100,000 new videos were added in 2007. It is the second most visited site worldwide.

LinkedIn:The darling of the business community, LinkedIn has more than 18 million users with more than a million new members joining every month. In 2007, LinkedIn experienced a growth rate of a little over 270%.

Not only should you monitor your own social media activities, your social media marketing strategy should also include monitoring your customers’ and potential customers’ social media activities. Web analytics data, as well as active involvement in key social media sites, will help you collect quantitative and qualitative information in order to understand and adjust to the activities and goals of your customers.

These suggestions assume a “top down” social media marketing strategy model where the organization’s leaders implement and lead the adoption of blogs, wikis and social networking systems. However, you may experience a “bottom up” adoption model where your employees spontaneously engage in social networking and it rises to the level of an organizational initiative. In this case, a collaborative social media marketing strategy process that engages employees already taking advantage of social media can provide tremendous insight into ways to use these tools and techniques to reach your business goals.

What has your experience been with social media marketing? Do you currently have a social media marketing strategy?  Please comment below.