Shiv Singh - Social Media Marketing For Dummies

The social media marketing space changes rapidly, so by the very definition of social media marketing, this book can’t be completely comprehensive. It does, however, aim to distill the core concepts, trends, tips, and recommendations down to bite-sized, easy-to-digest nuggets. As social media marketing touches all parts of marketing and all parts of the Internet, too (from traditional websites to social platforms to the mobile web), based on your own experiences, you’ll find some sections more valuable than others.

As you read this book, keep in mind that the way people influence each other online and impact purchasing and brand affinity decisions is similar to the way they’ve done for thousands of years in the real world. The technology is finally catching up, and social media marketing is fundamentally about allowing and encouraging that behavior to happen in a brand-positive manner online, too.

This book helps you understand why social media matters to marketers and how you can harness it to directly impact your own marketing efforts in meaningful ways. Targeted at both marketers in large organizations and those of you who work in small businesses or run small businesses, it includes advice for every business scenario.

In writing this book, we imagined someone pulling a copy off a bookshelf in a Barnes and Noble and scanning it to see whether it’s a valuable guide. And we wondered what that person would need to know to find this book interesting. Here are some of the assumptions we came up with about you:

You have a computer and/or mobile device with Internet access.

You’re using social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter.

You’re working in marketing or want to join the marketing field.

You have customers or prospective customers who use the web frequently.

You sell a product or service that you can market online.

You’re curious about social media and how it changes marketing.

In the margins of the book, you’ll find these icons helping you out:

Whenever we provide a hint that makes an aspect of social influence marketing easier, we mark it with a Tip icon.

The Remember icon marks paragraphs that contain a friendly reminder.

Heed the paragraphs marked with the Warning icon to avoid potential disaster.

Whenever we get technically inclined, we mark the paragraph with a Technical Stuff icon. If you’re not technically inclined, you can skip these nuggets of info.

This book is designed so that you can quickly jump to a specific chapter or section that most interests you. You don’t have to start with the first chapter — although if you’re new to social media marketing, we recommend that you do so. Understanding the foundation of social media marketing (which we explain in the early chapters) helps you better apply the techniques that you learn in the later ones to the specifics of your business.

You can also find the cheat sheet, complete with additional nuggets of information, for this book by going to www.dummies.com and searching for “Social Media Marketing For Dummies cheat sheet.”

Part 1

IN THIS PART …

Find out how to begin practicing SMM.

Learn how to find your SMM competitors.

Discover what goes into developing a Social Media Marketing mindset.

Chapter 1

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding social media’s role in social influence

Discovering the different roles played by social media participants

Knowing what types of influencers you’re marketing to

Coordinating your efforts with other types of marketing

Moving beyond corporate marketing

When marketing online, you design websites, run display banner advertising, publish videos to YouTube, and push your website listings higher up in the search engine rankings to promote and sell products. It’s easy to forget how people actually buy. It’s easy to assume that the potential customers are lonely people crouched over their computers late at night, choosing what products to add to a shopping cart — isolated from the real world and their family and friends.

But in reality, that’s not how people buy online today. It might have been the case in the early days of the web, when the people spending time online were the early adopters and the mavericks, the ones willing to take the risk of putting their credit card numbers into a computer hoping for accurate charges and secure transactions. In those days, few people bought online, and the ones who did were on the fringes of mainstream society.

Those days are over now. With over 300 million people using the web on a regular basis in the United States alone and approximately 3.2 billion users globally, using the Internet has become a mainstream social activity. Consumers approach purchasing online differently, too, and as a result, you need to approach your marketing online differently as well. Your approach must incorporate influence and the different roles that people play in the realm of social media, especially because social media itself has changed over the last decade with the rise of smartphones.

This chapter discusses the fundamentals of social media marketing: what it is, how it works, who the players are, and what it means in the context of your other marketing efforts.

A discussion of any subject needs to begin with a definition, and so here’s the one for social media marketing: Social media marketing (SMM) is a technique that employs social media (content created by everyday people using highly accessible and scalable technologies such as social networks, blogs, micro-blogs, message boards, podcasts, social bookmarks, communities, wikis, and vlogs).

Social media (which has probably been one of the most hyped buzzwords of the last decade) refers to content created and consumed by regular people for each other. It includes the comments a person adds at the end of an article on a website, the family photographs she uploads to a photo-sharing service, the conversations she has with friends in a social network, and the blog posts she publishes or comments on. That’s all social media, and it’s making everyone in the world a content publisher and arbitrator of content. It’s democratizing the web. Facebook, shown in Figure 1-1, is the most popular social network. It allows you to connect with friends and share information in a matter of minutes. Facebook has 2.41 billion monthly active users around the world.