The core strength of Web 2.0 is interaction. Internet social media marketing uses platforms that combine social interaction and technology. It empowers companies to engage in a two way communication with their clients, prospective customers and strategic business partners. The wide reach of social media has made it a very powerful tool for any marketer. For instance, Facebook alone has about 500 million active users who spend over 700 billion minutes per month on the site. The other popular social networking sites are MySpace, Stumble Upon and Twitter.

The 5 Most Important Things About Internet Social Media Marketing

Here are some things that you must keep in mind to use internet social media marketing to enhance your business.

  • Integrate social media and marketing:
    Your social media presence needs a strategy and this strategy cannot work in isolation of your broader marketing strategy. The lifeblood of social media involvement is internal collaboration, with social media objectives and tools being integrated with the marketing mix.
  • Go Global, Stay Local:
    The internet has a global reach and can extend your brand across the oceans without any additional costs. However, to engage your target audience in discussions, you need to identify their interests, issues and lives. This requires you to have a local perspective and not seem alien to your audience. For instance, Google (possibly the most global internet entity) displays search results based on your location. Apart from greater convenience and relevance for users, this strategy makes Google cease to be a foreign entity.
  • Build Your Brand Through Relationship Building:
    The first thing you need to do is to attract readers, friends or followers. You can do this by creating a buzz around your product or company. People are not interested in being advertised to. To grab their attention, you could initiate discussions around current trends, hot topics or something that is of high relevance to them. Other ways of creating buzz is competitions, humor and freebies. Once you have attracted them, keep them involved. Respond to people promptly and regularly. See if you can help them with something (maybe with some information, not necessarily related to your company). Continue discussions. Definitely talk about what your company is doing for society (even if it is economizing on paper to save trees). Once you have built a relationship, internet social media marketing becomes easy.
  • Use Social Media for Customer Service:
    Good customer service can become your USP and significantly aid marketing. Follow up on customers, even if there are no complaints. Get their feedback and try to incorporate them. Communicate new offers, schemes and deals to them. Social networking sites can be used to form a client community that can be used to share ideas, complaints as well as educational material.
  • Use Social Media to Identify Gaps:
    Alot of information about your market and competitors is available through social media sites. Internet social media marketing should focus on analysing the information and identifying where your competitors fall short and you can immediately target on filling the gap.

Using internet social media marketing makes you accessible to all those who are interested in your product, and even those who do not know about your product. Internet social media marketing is so diverse that it can be used in highly creative ways to enhance your business.

The author, Aritro Bhattacharya, is a member of the web content writers’ team with Veda Informatics.