What is Social Media

This is from the Linked Media Group website.  Thought is was a particularly good summary of Social Media.

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Social Media

Social media is about moving from one-way broadcasts to two-way conversations with a targeted audience – turning passive constituents into engaged participation sessions online. Social Media Marketing blends technology and process to promote your web site, brand, product or service through established social media channels – generating incremental click back traffic, high quality links, conversations about your brand/products/services, advocates for your products and services and much more.

There is no absolute form or process that works universally and there is a tremendous amount of overlap with all Social Media Marketing – the more the better in many cases. Brand reputation is enhance when you increase viewership, discussions, comments, analysis, critiques, etc. – our job is to expose your products/services to a broad community, get them to talk about you and recommend your brand to their community of friends.

How does Social Media Marketing Help You?

If you can share your content with others, and they are listening (reading, watching and experiencing), then there is great opportunity for your brand, public relations, sales and marketing. The secret lies in making everything available. The value lies in other people doing the work for you by sharing, telling, even creating more of your content for others.

Social Media marketing helps to generate primary and secondary traffic back to your site. Primary traffic is simply visitors who clickthrough directly from a Social Media site – secondary traffic is referral traffic from web sites which link to your site and refer visitors to you, after visitors find your content (Article, Blog Excerpt, Link, Video, etc.) on a Social Media site.

Think links too, popularity ratings with Digg, Reddit or other top tier SM sites will generate a large number of links for you, which help with ongoing SEO rankings and incremental traffic.

Our Three Absolute Laws for Successful Social Media Marketing

Most if no all forms of Social Media Marketing processes will address one of these three core types of actions, with overlap being the order of the day.

• Declare Your Identify
• Foster Association and Interaction
• Initiate User Interaction and Conversations

Declare Your Identity means your are declaring your online persona or identify, who you are, how you can be found online and where. “Identity Declaration” encompasses anything from your Blog Profile to your About Us page, your bio on YouTube, Squidoo, Hub Pages, your LinkedIn profile or Facebook page. This is a passive process, in that you are just “identifying who you are” not “pushing this out to third parties in most cases.”

Foster Association and Interaction is your way of giving third parties (customers, vendors, commentators, friends, family, etc.) to associate with you formally or informally online. Encompassing people posting about you via a Blog Roll on a blog, making a recommendation on LinkedIn on your behalf, “friending” you via Friendster or more consumer focused Social Media sites, following you on Twitter, Furl, Delicious – we are oversimplifying a bit, as we are mixing some more business oriented sites with consumer sites.

Initiate User Interactions and Conversations – in the online world you want users to talk about your company, its products or services – this is usually a good thing. If they aren’t, our job is to initiate and monitor these conversations on your behalf; or, more importantly, make sure your site has an integrated forum that lets people post about your products and services that we can monitor and respond to.

We were posting over ten years ago on Discussion Boards, Groups and CompuServe – fast forward to today and we are using some of the same processes, but incorporating a much broader base of sites (Google, Yahoo Groups, MSN/AOL Groups, Affinity Sites, Kaboodle Groups, Ning, Blog comments, etc.

We want to provoke, initiate and stimulate conversations with the broad community – what people like, dislike or even hate about your company – but, always respect their input, time and the implicit value in the dialogue you are building with them.

No that we have hopefully given you a sense about Social Media Marketing Services here is a list of our Core Services:

Initiating and Growing Organic Conversations

• Blogs
• Podcasts
• Article Sites
• Online Videos
• Wikis
• Social Networks
• Online Surveys
• Widget Development
• Webcasts (Broadcast & Archived)
• Integrating SEO Optimized Site Content
• Comment Posting
• Content Chunks & Posting
• Viral Content
• Cultivating Network of Supporters
• White Papers

How to Measure Social Media Marketing

As stated earlier, RO analysis for Social Media Marketing is not as easy as SEO, CPC campaigns, etc. We know of services that charge anywhere from a few thousand dollars a month to tens of thousands But, here are some metrics that we utilize for most of our clients to measure effectiveness which help us to track ROI.

• Traffic Spikes using Analytics
• YouTube Video Views
• Overall Web Site Traffic Trends
• Leads/Downloads/Calls
• Facebook or LinkedIn Friends/Contacts
• Improved Search Rankings
• Discussion Posts
• Alexa (good for broad trends)
• Compete
• Google Trends (only high volume keywords though)

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