The social habitat provided by the so called Web 2.0, mainly through the appearance of tools that involved a collaborative approach in the Web, allowed users to find an easier way to upload contents to the net. Now people don´t just browse contents, but they may also produce them very simply.
[CC-BY 2.0], Flickr https://flic.kr/p/7S21N9
Web 2.0 extents to the world of marketing, providing many chances to disseminate our products, ideas or projects. This way, it is usually denominated Social Media Marketing to the strategy that sets social networking sites with commercial or advertising purposes.
In the next video you can see an introduction to Social Media Marketing.
It is important to take into account the developments occurred in marketing in social media:
• Marketing 1.0: marketing mainly focused on the product.
• Marketing 2.0: a qualitative leap has been made and now marketing focuses on consumers, their tastes and preferences.
• Marketing 3.0: it is the marketing focused on people, and consists basically of the creation of emotional links with customer, generating loyalty and trying to reach possitive opinions spread to other possible clients.
We will have a look to the main social tools (also known as Social Media Tools), provided by the Internet to help us spread our products or personal branding, and thus to implement a Social Media Marketing.
4.1. Blogs
It is possibly the most useful resource to make our work and our products known, to write about our interests, and eventually to share these interests with our fans or followers.
This way, the main goal of your blog will be to put into practice the so called “Content Marketing”, which means to offer interesting content to catch the attention of users. This will also let you offer your products or ideas to a large number of people.
The two free platforms most used all over the world to create blogs are Blogger and WordPress. Blogger is a tool from Google, so you only have to get a google account to use it, directly from https://www.blogger.com.
As for WordPress, you can register for free in https://wordpress.com/start/ in order to create your blog.
Both services will offer you uncountable possibilities to create your personal or professional blog, and little by little you will be able to integrate a large number of plugins or additional elements to your blog, for instance, RSS channels from other interesting blogs, your twitter account, access to files/documents, etc.
Remember that your blog will be your “main website” to create contents, so you will link to other social tools from your blog.
Here are some useful tips to improve your blog visibility:
• Try to outline clearly from the beginning your blog subject, defining your identity.
• Create interesting and relevant content for the user. This will reply to your posts or blog links through other social media, like twitter.
• Don´t make too long posts, and be sure they are always related to the selected subject.
• Try to create appalling headings that catch readers attention: it will facilitate spreading to other social media or services for sure.
• Keep in touch with other outstanding bloggers that share you field of interest, to have them talk about you as well.
• It is also important to write regular and frequently in our blog. Do it once a day or at least several times per week.
• Write positive comments in other blogs in order to improve your personal image.
4.2. Twitter
Twitter is considered to be a microbloging tool. It gives the possibility of sending text messages provided that they have no more than 140 characters and it is precisely the most used one of this type worlwide (it has already more than 500 million users all over the world).
Twitter is normally used to get your followers informed about what you are doing at the moment, to share something that you like, to publish specific information about an event, etc.
It is very useful as a marketing tool, since it can be used, for example, to send links of a specific blog or specific information on our products or project. To do this, it is important that our Twitter account has more and more followers.
Twitter offers the following advantages among others: getting a higher visibility for our products, ideas or project, improving our reputation or interacting with the public that we want to reach.
If we use Twitter properly, it can help us significatively with our products marketing. Some of the things we may do are the following:
• Share news or other interesting data related to our product.
• Retweet or mention news or important people of our scope.
• Announce through tweets those events we attend related to our specialty.
• Use elements such as photographs or videos to draw the attention of feasible followers.
• Connect our blog and some other social network such as Facebook to our Ttwitter account. Thus, when we write a post, it will go automatically to our Twitter account and also, we will be able to display all our tweets from our blog.
• Interact with our followers.
4.3. Facebook
Facebook is by far the most widely used social network. Having a Facebook profile is one of the most important things that we have to do if we want to become visible (we or our product) through social networks.
From the social networks marketing point of view, Facebook will enable us, among other aspects, to:
• Make more people visit our website or blog, so our product or service will be more visible. We will have a higher number of sales and a higher number of people subscribed to our blog or website.
• Direct dissemination of the posts in our blog, directly through our profile or page, or in Facebook groups in which we participate actively.
• Promote the number of attendants to an event that you occasionally organise: presentation, exhibition, participation in a workshop or session, etc.
• Increase the display of a specific video showing some of our products, in the event that we have created any in some video storage such as Youtube or Vimeo.
• Create advertisements in Facebook directly, through a service available for this purpose, in https://www.facebook.com/business/ It also allows us to segment our advertisements in order to address them specifically to a specific user.
• Connect this social network to our website or blog, for example through “Like” buttoms or direct access to our blog.
• Create a new business page about our product on Facebook, which incorporates excellent statistical to analyze our marketing strategy.
4.4. Google +
It is a social networking website run by Google. Just as Facebook, its large amount of features will enable us to promote our brand or product. For example:
• Participate in user communities related to our product.
• The contents we share will be indexed by Google. Therefore, when searching on Google, they will be more easily found by people interested.
• If we receive a positive assessment about the contents that we share (“+1”, similar to “Like” in Facebook), there is a highly likelihood that we will be shown in the first positions of those searches related to the aforementioned content or product.
• Incorporate its strong analytical tools.
• It also enables us to create a business or company website, through which we can publish our products.
• Include links to Google + directly on our blog or website, in a similar way as we do it on Facebook.
4.5. LinkedIn
It is the most widely used professional social networking service. It enables us to contact other companies and professionals from many sectors. Some of its advantages are the following:
• It is really useful to contact other professionals related to our own business or product.
• It also enables us to contact potential customers because it comprises many specialised sectors in which millions of people participate.
• Create a useful contact network to spread our products.
• Advanced search to search contacts, companies, collaborations, etc.
• It enables us to join large specialised thematic groups, in which many people participate.
• Improve and strenghten our personal brand.
• It enables us to share our publications on different groups or on other services, such as Twitter.
4.6. Youtube
On Youtube, we can create our personal profile and upload our own videos very easily. We can also create what is called a “Youtube Channel”, to which people interested in our videos may subscribe. By doing so, we establish a video displaying social network.
As a marketing strategy, We can use this service to upload promotional videos or any other type of videos about ourselves. This will be useful as a corporative marketing tool, because it enables to share and spread through other services that we have previously created: Twitter, Facebook, Google +, LinkedIn, or directly on our website or blog.
The following is a list of recommendations to ensure that a larger number of people watch your videos:
• Create a channel associated to your product, personal brand or project.
• Upload videos to your channel regularly. Make sure they are original and yours.
• Create playlists with different videos (playlists are categories that we can create in our channel and where we can link interesting videos related to a specific topic, even though these videos do not belong to us).
• It is also useful to create a presentation video of your channel.
• Include some of the videos that we create in other services offered in our social networks.
4.7. Flickr and Instagram
They are image and video hosting social networks that allow users to share pictures and videos. They may be very useful, specially if we want to publicize creatively our personal brand, our product or services philosophy, to show pictures of the events you organize, exhibitions of your products, etc.
In the infographic below, you will find a summary of the main existing social media tools and their advantages.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/266767977911423487/
Use of the main social media tools in figures