When you write about something that interests people, you have a better chance of receiving more website traffic.  Spread any news, links and current events on social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook to incorporate other small business website owners into a web of followers.

My general rule for posting on social media websites is to avoid too much self promotion in order to offer a great deal to others without seeming like spam.  Keep your self promoting links down to around 2 instances out of 10 so you won’t seem like you are only there to generate business for yourself, but to meet new people.

When networking in social media, a few common rules of etiquette should be followed.  Speak to your social peers without flowery language in a matter-of-fact verbage.  When posting about interesting links, use catchy titles that draw the reader in.  Make your post titles answer the question, “Why should I read this and can I get something useful out of it?”

Another important rule to follow is that you shouldn’t build yourself up so much that you tear down your competition.  Never criticize others in the same line of business as you.  Act professionally and try to keep your posts as business related as possible.  Write simple enough so that anyone would understand, but involved enough so others know you are qualified in your business niche.

Share interesting links you find that have to do with the business you are in.  When you write in Twitter and even Facebook, Google is indexing your post in the search engine index.  Use this to your advantage to post on the subject that is most suitable for your business to let search engines understand you are rather involved in your occupation.

Try to keep it friendly and social, but don’t post about your trivial day-to-day events.  Don’t mention the bananas in your cereal, or where you are at every moment of the day.  These types of practices could dilute your social networking content.

Using social media marketing to promote your small business website is a natural method to build your online presence.  I always felt, why should business owners pay for links to their website when you can be promote yourself for free with little effort.  Just as pay per click may work for some business owners, but unless you are getting huge amounts of traffic, the payoff is usually nominal.

If your business has a website, blog and online e-commerce, then social media marketing could be a good choice when you don’t want to spend money to get customers.  Having an online presence is only beneficial if your business is getting regular visitors and traffic.  Promoting your website and blog on social media platforms only takes time instead of money, and the idea of driving traffic to your website is to answer a question for your website visitor: “What can this company do for me?”

Your website needs to aid your potential customers understand how your products and services can make their lives easier.  Lay out the benefits of your company to draw in your traffic and make them interested in your business niche.

Twitter and Facebook have lately been cornering the market on social media networking.  Being the most popular social media websites, the number of Twitter and Facebook users are well into the millions.  Facebook has around 320 million users to date, and Twitter has a reported number somewhere between 6 to 14 million accounts.

Take advantage of social media marketing for bringing more traffic and potential customers to your small business website.  Incorporate social networking into your online presence, and use social media marketing to promote yourself and drive traffic to your website today.

By Megan Meldrum, meldru17@msu.edu, http://newmediadl.com,

I am a graduate student at Michigan State University. The program has implemented a class called New Media Drivers’ License, teaching students about the impact that social media can have in the marketing and public relations fields and how this impact can benefit our future clients.

The line that is the most recurring and the one I believe is the concept that must be accepted before participating in social media marketing is this, “the conversation will happen, with or with you.”

This is the truth. The harsh truth, some might say. For businesses, it is so important to understand this truth. They can chose to become an active participant in social media marketing or they can take the traditional route but the fact remains that their customers are out there creating and participating in conversations that directly impact the reputation of their brand both positively and negatively. For businesses, I believe that social media marketing requires baby steps that begin with education. It is still so difficult for traditional businesses to understand interactive marketing. They know that they have a website, but the deeper understanding of how that living document works and the extensive platform it provides for communication with their customers is still somewhat foggy.

Social media is also still vastly misunderstood. Social media marketing, I have learned is not just about joining Facebook and Twitter and posting some status updates to say that your company is joining this particular club because the young kids say so or writing a blog simply to have a presence online. It is not about using these platforms to post an event or promote a sale. It is about meaningful content. This meaningful content will help in developing trust and maintaining a conversation between a brand and its customers in an effort to build a relationship that translates into a positive reputation within the market. Reputation is what it is all about because no matter what a brand’s Facebook page says, if that company isn’t good to its customers, people will find out and the message will be seen by no one and worse than that, no one will talk about it.

The Social media elements like Facebook and Twitter pages and blogs should be considered marketing tactics, they should not become the overall goals and objectives of a brand. They should be treated as individual tasks that support a social media strategy within a marketing plan. It requires more than a Facebook fan page to turn strangers into fans and then turning fans into customers.

Social media is a hard sell. Again, because many businesses are not convinced that it is not just a trend that will die out. Many may not admit this, but it is still taking some convincing to get a business to invest in digital. They need to see the take away and ROI. It is still about the bottom line more it is about the story of flowery benefits that reputation building will bring. Even though the rend goal is the same. Explaining the correlation is tricky. This is where SEO comes in. Although, I am learning that SEO is not defined the same way it was five years ago. And why would it, really? Nothing digital is anymore. It grows too fast.

SEO analytics can determine how much traffic a website is getting from month to month. It can help explain the areas of a site that are getting more attention than others and lead decisions on where to continue investing budget.

I read recently that the most beneficial concept for a client to understand about SEO is that they want the most relevant traffic results, not just the highest number of traffic. Clients want visitors to utilize their site because they are specifically looking for that brand’s products, not because they were accidentally sent to their site by mistake. Just like most worthwhile things, it is about quality, not necessarily quantity. This will help them not just get a purchase here or there, but to build a loyal customer base.

This path has been a slow one for many to subscribe to and I understand the reasons, but the fact remains: the conversation will continue with or without brand participation. The trust of the customers is in the bloggersphere and other social media venues and that is where a brand should be if they want a piece of that trust pie.

http://newmediadl.com

Coca Cola

Coca-Cola made their social media debut a few years ago. They created a new office of “Digital Communications and Social Media” because they felt social media was the way to go. They still feel this way.

Clyde Tuggle, Coke’s Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs and Productivity said: “Mass media is declining in importance. Our future success depends on our continued ability to connect people to our brands and our company all around the world, one person at a time. Our new office of digital communications and social media will help us become even more comfortable and effective in these new spaces.”

Coca Cola began their social media efforts with CokeTag – a “personal, customizable widget for individuals, bands, bloggers, artists, and companies to share links to content they want to promote and drive traffic to anywhere on the Web.” A widget as a marketing tool is pretty original thinking by itself.

This January Coca-Cola launched “Expedition 206″ on social media sites like YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Three “happiness” ambassadors began an international journey to all 206 countries where Coca-Cola is sold. Their mission is to seek out “what makes people happy” around the world. Throughout the journey, these “happiness” ambassadors will share their blog posts, tweets, videos, interviews and pictures so people can follow their adventures along the way. 


Ford Motor Company

Ford has been on the forefront of social media marketing ever since it hired Scott Monty back in 2008. Monty spearheaded Ford’s social media strategy with a promise to “create content, set it free, and allow anyone who is interested to be able to share it on any of the major platforms, on a global basis.” It has been working well.

Their recent Ford Fiesta Movement social media campaign was impressive. It was a grassroots campaign that promoted the new Fiesta model by placing it in the hands of 100 social “agents” and having them promote it through Twitter, blogs, video, and events. They generated 4.3 million YouTube views, 500,000 + Flickr views, 3 million + Twitter impressions and 50,000 potential customers – and 97% of them don’t own a Ford. They did this all without spending a dollar on traditional media.
Not only has Ford faired the recession better than the other American automakers, but they are also winning the buzz war on social media sites as well.

Nabisco Triscuit Crackers

This year Triscuit Crackers is teaming up with a nonprofit organization called Urban Farming to create 50 community-based home farms throughout the country. Nabisco – a subsidiary of Kraft Foods – has rarely ventured into social media – and never in an altruistic way like this.

The “home farming” campaign has a website that includes tools to advise visitors which vegetables and herbs are best to plant based on where they live. The campaign is being supported by PR, print ads, banner ads on gardening, women’s general interest sites, labeling on the boxes that sends customers to the website, blogs, Twitter and community forums. Another tool they developed enables users to find nearby community farms, and add their own home farms to a map. Forums and sharing tools are prominently displayed.
They also include free basil and dill herb seed cards on four million boxes of Triscuit original and reduced-fat varieties.

Pepsi

Pepsi launched their Pepsi Refresh Project in January and it has been a refreshing change from traditional soft drink advertising. Users submitted thousands of ideas to Pepsi on ways to “refresh” their communities and thereby making them a better place. There were 32 Pepsi Refresh Grant recipients selected in the month of January and up to $1.3 million will be awarded. There are 2 grants at the $250,000 level, 10 grants at the $50,000 level, 10 grants at the $25,000 level and 10 grants at the $5,000 level every month for 10 months. The winners for January will be announced this week.

The Pepsi Refresh Project also held a celebrity challenge on their Facebook fan page. In this contest Demi Moore beat Kevin Bacon and Pepsi awarded $250,000 to support Girls Educational & Mentoring Services (GEMS) and $100,000 to SixDegrees.org, an organization that distributes thousands of $20 SixDegree.org Good Cards to recipients so they can support a charity of their choice.

Track your results from each type of marketing so you can find out which is best for your business. Social media sites are one of the types of venues that are proving to be terribly successful. Where you find the people, you will also find the marketers, and that is why social media is the newest horizon for marketing. Social media sites offer an opportunity to reach out to your customers and prospects in a very personable way.

1) Video Sharing

One of the most popular options to date, videos are constantly being shared online. Originally, sites like YouTube were launched to offer a home stage for aspiring artists in both performing and production. As it has evolved over time, businesses are using YouTube to market with great success. By creating brief, entertaining videos that clearly connect to their brand, companies are able to offer little snippets of entertainment to their clients and prospects while building their brand recognition. YouTube is also a great place for companies to put product directions, demonstrations and installation instructions as well.

Most video sites have made it easy to share videos, and because they are simple to share, it is easy for them to go viral. The sites offer easy rating systems, so that as one is tagged a favorite, even more users will want to see it. Most social networking sites also make videos easy to share, and if a video is pertinent to a business, it is easy to pull it in and publish it as well. Video marketing is especially effective for online businesses, because they can spread virally and really create a buzz about the business very quickly.

When a video really hits the nail on the head, most sites let people leave comments, so the business owner can get a sense of what people are thinking when they watch the video.

2) Social Networking

Another amazing way to market online is through a social networking site where a business can share relevant with its customers and prospects. If you offer useful information, your business can gain a strong following.

Social Media Marketing is a Daily Affair

Many Internet users do not make it through a day without logging into at least one social networking site. From a marketing standpoint, this is once per day that you can touch your customers and prospects. Of course, you do not want to build a network of random people for your marketing efforts. Obviously the more focused and directed the effort is the better advertising results your company will realize. Social marketing networks also offer and excellent opportunity for feedback.

By using social media sits to market businesses can talk directly to everyone in their network. They not only can give out information this way, but they can hear what their customers think about them. Knowing this information is particularly valuable, because if there are any service or product problems brewing the company can nip them in the bud. Social networking sites give your business video the chance to go viral.

Internet marketers have discovered that the social media sites are where all of the people are hanging out online. By participating in social media marketing, businesses can find out what their customers are saying about them. It also gives businesses a chance to assess how people view their competition, and then they can take that information and use it to improve their own company. Not only is social media marketing an effective way to get new clients, but it is also a great way to keep the ones that you already have.

A belief that if allowed to interact freely online, people will post spam and abuse online forums. This is not always the case. Developing a clear social media strategy and plan is the best way to achieve success. Rather than automatically implementing a program on the four major social media avenues — blogs, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn — it’s important to first step back and see what makes sense to reach your stakeholders and customers. Ultimately, because social media is about relationships, it is important to thoroughly understand what matters to them, rather than what is easiest for you.

Social media is considered as a replacement to email marketing. This is not true as email is a push method that informs customers and prospects when you need them to be contacted. In fact, Social Media requires much more email communication to keep social site users coming back. Think about all the email you get from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter!
You cannot build quality relationships online. The thinking on this goes that it is a waste of time to connect with people online that you don’t know in real life because this practice doesn’t lead to lasting relationships with your brand. However this is not the case in actual. Social media enables you to be face to face with your target audience. Even if they don’t go onto become paying customers, you still get valuable insight into what they think and what they react to.

Social media marketing is for kids. Most people think that social media is used by a lot of kids, therefore it is only a toy and not to be taken seriously for assessment as a business tool. According to analysis by iStrategyLabs, Facebook experienced 276% growth in users aged 35-54 in 2009 and is its fastest growing segment. Therefore social media is for everyone.

Personal advantage should not always b thought of. The perception that social media gives away content and ideas you should be charging for is wrong. The more you give, the more you receive in social media. You need to let go of the idea that all the content you produce is proprietary, engage with your audience and share with them what you have created.
The benefits of social media marketing are tremendous only if these myths are not taken into consideration. With good strategies, you can explode out the gate and grow your business well beyond expectations.

Many people wonder what the term “social media” really means. After all, it is a fairly loose, catchall umbrella term. While this may bear some truth, it should not work to underestimate social media’s importance. In general, social media is thought to be any virtual platform that allows the user to take control and actually broadcast about his or her life. Whether the reason behind this is that people love to talk about themselves or that people love to hear others talk about themselves (it’s probably a combination of both), social media is here to stay. Ignoring the trend is no different than ignoring the automobile; we’re not going back in time in the near future.

Social media gives the strategic marketer a veritable treasure trove worth of tools to make use of. While many people think of social media just being made up of website such as Facebook and Twitter, the full-range of the spectrum proves that there are hundreds of options for the social media marketer to take advantage of. Take blogging, for instance. Many people view blogs as being sources of either hard fact or personal accounts, and don’t take into account the fact that blogging can be used to promote products & services. A smart company will have an interesting, accessible blog, as this will heighten the interest of the consumer. Learning to use blogging technology can take your business to levels unforeseen.

While blogging is useful, there’s a reason why sites like Facebook and Twitter define social media – they’re extremely popular, and each holds millions of members that are all targets for various forms of marketing. Sure, posting banner ads on Facebook will likely get your website more traffic and may even help to increase business. The real potential, however, is setting up a Facebook page devoted to your products or services. As with blogging, you’ll want your Facebook page to be attractive and interesting to read, complete with pictures and commentary.

Have you ever considered how effective a simple tweet about a new product you’ve released can be? Many people don’t even think about how useful Twitter can be to a marketing campaign. The bottom line is that Twitter’s popularity is higher than it has ever been, and making use of the service for marketing can be very effective.

Start using social media today and watch business increase!

Social media is an unavoidable part of online marketing today. It is linked with SEO, with advertising, with branding, with customer service and e-commerce and it is making businesses more effective and more accessible to their customers. Millions of web users – potential and existing customers – are members of social media networks, and social media offers a low cost, low risk, and high reward method of marketing online.

We’re going to discuss a few areas and examples which could cause social media to work against you, and negatively affect your business and its reputation.

#1 – Being Unresponsive

For example, an existing client tweets an issue and nobody responds to them – the client gets frustrated, annoyed, tweets their feelings and worst case scenario you lose a customer. At best, you just look bad. Ignoring feedback, questions and problems instantly gives a bad impression of your customer service skills. Fair enough that a random question out of the ether gets missed from time to time, but you need to look after your existing customers, and in turn they will work for you with great word of mouth recommendation.

#2 – Ignoring Negative Feedback

You can’t just respond to your fans and your evangelists. By all means, reward and interact with those who say nice things about you, but it’s never a good idea to ignore the badmouthing ones completely. Of course you need to be selective here – the mindless, spammy negative comments that everyone receives in some shape or form can be safely ignored – they’re just looking to get a rise out of you. But the ones that genuinely have an issue, feel hard done by, feel let down by your company – those are the ones you need to engage with, apologise to, and try to work out a solution or compensation. You really can turn a negative into a positive and completely U-turn a potentially damaging situation.

#3 – Treating Social Media as an Experiment

Some advice, in the form of an oldie but a goodie: “You get out what you put in.” Social media marketing can be of great benefit to your business, your brand, your online strength. It can boost traffic and sales and visibility. But it won’t do all that for you if you simply set up a Twitter account, chat a bit, and leave it at that. It won’t do all that for you if you sign up to a thousand different social networks but effectively contribute to none. Like any other marketing strategy, it needs planning, observation, time, monitoring and focus to be a success. Don’t treat it like something on the side – social media, whether you like it or not, is a big part of internet marketing today.

#4 – Thinking Short Term Rather than Long Term

Though it’s true that social media works in the here and now, in ‘realtime’, you shouldn’t assume that your view should be restricted to the present. When building a social media marketing strategy for your business, you need to think about your aims and goals, what you want to achieve, how you intend to implement your plans. Short term goals are great too, but if you don’t set targets, it will be impossible to track your progress and your success.

#5 –  Ignoring the Repercussions your Actions have on your Brand

Whatever you post online, whatever you tweet or share, represents you and your company. Though social media revolves around personalisation, conversation and being genuine and honest with your customers – that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still be professional. Keep personal and professional accounts (and opinions) separate. Social networking has the power to have a huge positive or negative effect on your brand’s reputation. Treat everyone you talk to as a potential customer and treat them kindly!

Browse in-depth TOC on Effective Social Media Marketing Strategies for Pharmaceutical Market.
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http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/Pharma-Social-Media-245.html

The ability to incorporate consumer feedback to develop new products is also expected to initiate a strategic shift in the operational model of pharma companies. Social media involvements are expected to increase product sales, especially those of OTC drugs, in the long term. Novartis for instance has already begun using Youtube and Facebook to enhance the sales for its OTC drugs such as Comtrax, Orofar and Bufferin. J&J, one of the first pharma giants to enter the social media space, has used online platforms for crisis management – when the company recalled its products (Tylenol and Benadryl tablets) it used social websites to apologize to consumers for irregularities in its manufacturing plant found during FDA inspection.

Market estimates and forecast

The report provides in-depth social media usage in pharmaceutical industry and analyses top 20 pharmaceutical players individually, for their social media presence. Further effective social media strategies are discussed in detail that can be useful in developing a successful social media campaign for pharmaceutical market. Benefits, Risks and Future impact of social media are analyzed separately. Geographic variations in terms of social media usage and regulations are also covered.

What makes our reports unique?

We provide the longest market segmentation chain in this industry- not many reports provide market breakdown upto level 5.
We provide 10% customization. Normally it is seen that clients do not find specific market intelligence that they are looking for. Our customization will ensure that you necessarily get the market intelligence you are looking for and we get a loyal customer.
15 pages of high level analysis including benchmarking strategies, best practices and the market’s cash cows (BCG matrix). We conduct detailed market positioning, product positioning and competitive positioning. Entry strategies, gaps and opportunities are identified for all the stakeholders.

Some of the popular sites of Social Media are Twitter, Digg, Facebook, Myspace etc. Through these social media sites you can contact many old friends and make many new ones as well. After developing a friendly relationship you can try out approaching few of them with some lucrative business proposals. Though this kind of marketing was not much popular few years back, with the enormous use of the Internet  in different avenues has made this type of marketing most popular. Creating an account in these social media sites is very easy. If used for business purposes  you have to enter the name and type of your Company in these sites along with other information. Whenever any of your acquaintances visit your home page these additional information will come along with your general profile. But for a better result you will have to update your account frequently.  There are some special social media marketing groups in the web. These are a type of club which asks you to join them. You can be a part of the professional network formed by these special media marketing tools. A popular site of this genre is LinkedIn.

Some advantages of social media marketing are:

Accessible over a large area:

The area of operation is vast in case of social media marketing. You are able to reach a larger number of customers than traditional marketing technique. As you keep on adding people to your site, you can get some as your customers as well or can get you important contacts of customers as well.

Quick feedback about products:

Since it is almost a personal one-to-one communication, feedback is very prompt. You do not have to wait for a long time to get a feedback about your product. Your clients or customers will give you instant feedback about the product marketed. As you are able to know exact reaction about your product, you have opportunity to make necessary changes in your product on a negative feedback. You can also know how to improve your product by the opinions given in these feedbacks.

Create brand loyalty and good reputation:

As you have the scope of interacting with your customers 24/7 your brand of product will attain good reputation. You can provide service to your customers and thus strengthen your brand loyalty.

Proper knowledge about your customers:

This personal interaction helps you to get a lot of information about your customers. As they will place their demand you can decide which product is of higher priority and who wants them the most. When you know for whom you are marketing then the process is made much easier.

Most cost effective method of marketing:

Creating an account in these types of sites is free. Once created you can use it for innumerable times and continue your marketing process. Even if you do not create a blog or an account in any of these social media sites, you can hire a professional outsourcing team to do it. Then also it is much lesser than other methods of marketing.

You can use your social media contacts for marketing purpose also. Social Media Marketing demands a lot of talent and time. You have to provide your customers with the best content regularly. The whole process of Social media marketing is very time consuming, first you have to create a brand loyalty then can this type of marketing be effective. As the published content is widely viewed, you are open to many unwanted criticisms.

Therefore, we can wrap up this article by saying that in this time of technological advancement, we cannot afford to be slow. With the vast advancement in the internet services and its several avenues, the world has become very small. We have to invent new avenues and be experimental with the help of this social media. We can try out to put it into several use one definitely for the business purpose.

Social media marketing is probably the most effective way of increasing web traffic to your site. This will never tamper with your established marketing campaigns. This will only add to your established campaigns. So how do you make money through this form of marketing? It is not that you will start earning revenues as soon as you post your links. This is an indirect way of creating brand recognition among people. The more people come to know about your site, the more they will visit your site. Unlike other web communities, social media websites ensure that there will be a daily inflow of traffic to your site. The social media websites will increase the potential of the site.

Social communities can help you to fetch web traffic. This in turn will also help in getting a good page ranking. When you consider social media marketing, you will note that this is a low-cost/high return business model. In other words, you will have to invest little money, but when you calculate the return, you will find that they have outnumbered the amount which you have invested. When you purchase links, you will have to spend thousands of dollars which is not the case with social media marketing. Moreover search engines now penalize website owners if they want to buy links to increase the popularity of their sites. In case of social media sites, there is no such problem as you can post your links for free.

Even an excellent blog can bring traffic to the site and increase your sales. In case of blogs, it is not the quantity, but quality which matters. You need not create thousands of blog posts; all you have to do is to create an excellent blog which will do the trick. Then you can push the blogs through the social media channels. The blogs can be emailed through email pitches to the other bloggers. The technique of increasing web traffic through social media marketing is not unknown, but most of us fail to realize its potential.

Even a single blog with good content can do the trick for you. Social media marketing is the perfect way to monetize the brand. This will ensure that you have a steady flow of traffic to the site and along with it there will be new visitors everyday. If you are willing to give in to this madness, you will find that social media marketing and Social Media Promotions has huge potentials. You just need to gather information about the know-how’s and use this mode of marketing effectively.