Social Media refers to the applications of digital media for the promotion of business through communication channels such as the Internet, email, websites, instant messaging systems etc. Social Media is interactive electronically-mediated technologies that facilitate the generation or sharing/reception/ exchange of content, ideas, career goals, other kinds of expression and other types of interaction through virtual communities and social networks. Social Media is used by people to generate, store, and share content through a website, blogs, message boards, discussion forums, wikis, RSS feeds, file repositories, social networking sites and public online profiles. In a broader sense, Social Media can refer to the interactivity that takes place in online communities like Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, Orkut, Twitter, etc.
How to use Social Media in Advertising? There are many options available when it comes to using social media for advertising. The most common way to advertise using this media platform is through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This helps in direct organic search results for the specific keyword. It helps in better visibility to the audience and increases the brand’s visibility among users in the targeted niche area. An SEO expert helps in creating a compelling keyword-rich copy that makes pages more searchable.
Advantages of Social Media: Social Media platforms provide the opportunity to create a personalized social network which can be used to connect with customers or potential customers. This is because the users get an opportunity to form relationships based on common interest and hobbies, shared values, or common goals. Most importantly, Social Media allows for user testing and user reviews which help in improving products and services. As social media best practices point out, “the best practices for advertising” include use of the right keywords and the correct form of URL links to help in better visibility to the audience.
How To Do Social Media Campaign: There are various ways in which to promote your products or services via social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and many others. The most popular social media accounts for business like Facebook are established business pages. Facebook Business Page is the top most business profile in Facebook with almost 500 million users and a great deal of access for marketing. For Twitter, it is recommended to use the official Twitter mobile application or get the RSS feeds from third party applications like Google Goggles and Tweetdeck. You can request for your clients to follow you on their favorite social media channels.
How To Do Social Media Advertising: Like any other medium, consistency and timing are vital to get the right impact. Social media platforms work on user’s timeline and hence there is considerable lag time between when you begin the campaign and when you start getting measurable results. Hence if you want to get the desired impact on day one, it is important that you pre-set or set the goals and objectives and stay focused on them throughout the campaign. The most important aspect is to ensure that all the social media platforms you have selected are relevant to your business. If you have selected all the social media platforms, but if they do not have enough relevance, then you will end up wasting your resources and you might not even make the sales that you had aimed for.
How To Do Social Media Advertising: Most of the social media websites offer a ‘Like’ or ‘Follow’ feature that allows people to comment and share their experiences with you and thus help you advertise your product. Pinterest is one such site where you can display your latest blog post or promotional content and attract more people to ‘like’ or share your page. If you use snapchat for advertising on Facebook, you can send snaps to all your friends that portray the extent of your promotions. Thus when one of your friends ‘likes’ a snap, it sends a notification to everyone who has been invited to the snap and as soon as one likes the snap, they are also encouraged to like/like your page and share it with their network. If you use twitter for social media advertising, you can use the hash tag to tweet out promotional content.
