How and Where Do I Market My Products?
There are hundreds of social network sites worldwide, but the most popular sites are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Tumblr. These sites will account for over 90% of all the visits on your shop. Facebook dominates user engagement, so if you are starting out and are confused on what website to prioritize, you have your answer. The second is Pinterest, and it has very high conversion rates as well. Your primary focus should be on these two websites when it comes to social marketing.
While online social network users spend over 30 hours a month on average on all networks combined, there are 720 total hours in a month. Therefore, about 4% of all social life in a month involves online social networks, while 96% does not. This is where Dark Social comes to play. This is the portion of life that is spent off of social networks. This may be spent anywhere, such as an IM app such as WhatsApp or an actual real life meeting. As a marketing person, your goal should be to capture the conversation whenever a discussion about a product you are selling takes place.
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| The entire process |
How to Go About It?
There are five steps in the social marketing process:
1. Fan acquisition
2. Engagement
3. Amplification
4. Community
Fan Acquisition:
Social marketing campaigns begin with fan acquisition, which involves using any of a variety of means, from display ads to News Feed and page pop-ups, to attract people to your Facebook page, Instagram feed, or other platform like a Web page. It’s like getting your brand “out there” in the stream of social messages. The goal is to receive their like or follow on your page.
Engagement:
The next step is to generate engagement, which involves using a
variety of tools to encourage users to interact with your content and brand located on your Facebook or Instagram pages. You can think of this as “starting the conversation” around your brand. You ideally want your fans to talk about your content and products. You can generate engagement through attractive photos, interesting text content, and blogger reports. You can also run contests to engage your users.
Amplification:
Amplification involves using the inherent strength of social networks in order to garner more eyeballs on to your page. As a marketer, your job is to make sure that your posts are shared by other users, so that it organically reached the feeds of people who have not yet liked your page. This means that you will have to post content that your users can relate to and promote your brand at the same time. You could run a contest where sharing your page is a requirement as well, in order to promote your page.
Community:
A community is a more or less stable group of fans who are engaged and communicating with one another over a substantial period of time. As a marketer, you have to use a number of tactics to nurture these communities, including inside information on new products, price breaks for loyalty, and free gifts for bringing in new members. The process ends with strengthening the brand and, hopefully,
additional sales of products and services.
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| Running contests expands your reach exponentially |
