Social Media

The buzzword "social media" is the process of gaining website traffic or attention through social media sites like Facebook or LinkedIn for example.

Social media usually works by attracting the attention of the viewers, creating interesting content and persuading people to share the links. Social media is the new word of mouth. Social media marketing is also considered "earned media" rather than "paid media" as you need traffic to get attention to the site.

Social media also uses a lot of "link baiting" which in my opinion shouldn't be used on news channels for example as its only purpose is to get people to click on the links just to get a bit of information. Some examples might be, "This dog was let out and you will never guess what happens NEXT!". They make people click on them because even if we didn't care about what happens next, we need to know. It becomes rather distasteful when CNN uses link baiting which could say, "This bomb fell on Tehran, you'll never guess what happens next!".

Purpose of social media:

The purpose of social media to create the products and services of a company more accessible by putting them on a medium which is easily discovered and viewed by all sorts of people.

Implementing a social media strategy:

Define your goals
You need to decide as a business what you want to achieve out of social media, what are your goals or general branding purpose? Do you want to interact with your audience or would you like to promote a new product or coupon?

Know your audience
It is important, like in all forms of marketing to understand your audience. This way you can create a marketing plan that targets that specific audience and captures their attention. If you market a car to people who enjoy cycling, you are just wasting valuable resources.

 Platform
 In addition to knowing you audience, you need to know which platform that specific audience uses. If it's a business to business advertisement it may be better to use LinkedIn. Also, things like job applications are also important to put on LinkedIn rather than Facebook to get the people that the business actually wants.

If you want to gain recognition or just to announce what is happening in your business, twitter is a good tool for that. Twitter allows you to link a few aspects to the main point of your advertisement or announcement. 

Plan your content and maintain it
It is important to have planned content, this way you can build on that content if it becomes viral or popular on the internet. It is vital to create a plan instead of willy nilly putting up things just for the sake of getting a couple of views.

While you have planned your content, this content should be updated continuously which keeps the potential customers informed and keen in the products.

To achieve a good plan and well kept upkeep it may be a good idea to hire a social media manager. Social media is a very effective way to promote your business and if done right you can get a lot out of it at a relatively low cost.