How Social Media Is Taking The Internet Marketing World By Storm

How Social Media Is Taking The

Internet Marketing World By Storm

Social sites like Facebook and Twitter offer unprecedented opportunities for

businesses of all sizes to reach millions of potential customers inexpensively

It was Thursday night that Janet logged into her Facebook page and noticed a comment about skin care from her friend Lisa.  Lisa had posted a link on her Facebook page to a skin care product that she absolutely loved and wanted to tell her friends on Facebook all about it (she has 357 friends).  Subsequently, those 357 friends also sent the information and link to their friends and those friends sent that message to their friends.  By Monday morning, the skin care company was inundated with requests for more information about their skin care product and sales went through the roof.  Such is the power of social media marketing.

Social media marketing is just beginning to catch on with the business world and companies that have adopted this lucrative strategy are enjoying tremendous business growth and substantial profits as a result.  Those businesses that are not using social media are being left in the dust by their competitors who do.  Never before has a marketing strategy offered the potential for a business to reach huge numbers of potential customers with little cost than social media networking.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube are among the top social sites that have memberships in the hundreds of millions.  Facebook alone has close to 500 million members who spend a good part of their day sharing messages with their friends.  Whether a business offers products and services locally, nationally, or internationally, social sites can reach the business’ audience with just the click of a mouse.  And not a dime has been spent to reach them.

There are two basic issues with implementing a successful social media strategy, however.  One is in knowing how to maneuver around the complexities involved in attracting “friends” and “followers” who will spread your message.  The other is creating the trusted content that people will respond to and share with their friends.  To get around these problems, most companies are using the services of social media marketing firms who know how to use Facebook and others to get the intended results, which is more business.

One such firm is NEPA Business Services, Inc. of Honesdale, PA (www.OnlineMarketingExpert.biz ).  According to Bernie Rosellen, the firm’s Social Media Marketing Specialist, the key to establishing a social media presence is to offer valuable information that is meaningful enough for people to share with friends in their social network.  “To be successful with social media, a business must first gain trust in the social community and then provide content in such a way that it is not perceived as a sales pitch or advertising.  That is the tricky part and many companies do not know how to do that effectively and they ultimately fail in their attempt.  Social site members will not respond to an advertising message and they will immediately hit the delete key.” Rosellen stated.

There is also another dimension in social media that does support an advertising message.  Facebook, for example, offers an extremely effective method for advertising on its members’ pages.  Similar to the Adwords concept offered by Google, Facebook allows advertisers to place ads on a pay-per-click basis.  Unlike the search engines, however, ads on Facebook can be directly targeted to attract only high quality prospects.  Ads can be posted on people’s pages based on their gender, location, income, employment, age, occupation or whatever criteria are significant to the product offering.  When someone clicks on a Facebook ad, a business can be assured that their product or service is relevant to the prospect and the potential for a sale is high.  Also, the cost of advertising drops precipitously since only qualified prospects will click on the ad.

Whether you are a one-man show or own a large business, there is no question that social media marketing can provide a substantial revenue stream for your organization.  With a carefully crafted online strategy and its implementation by an experienced social media expert, any sized company can reap the benefits of this new phenomenon.  The only question that remains is when are you going to embrace social media marketing and start enjoying more business?