Download File Training on Digital Marketing for ... - UNIDO-ICAMT

Digital Marketing Education Program by RMN Company
ANNEX-1
Online Social Media
Social media is a relatively new development in the Web space. Social media sites allow users from all
over the world to interact with each other on diverse subjects. Estimates suggest that social media sites
connect 1.5 billion people all across the world.
As many of them are presumed to be the consumers of various products and services, marketers target
them through social media messaging to promote their brands. There are further categories of social
media sites including general-purpose sites, professional networks, and microblogging sites.
Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter are some of the popular social networks. Similarly, YouTube
for video sharing and Pinterest for picture sharing are the other examples of social networking sites.
You can use social media sites in different ways. For example, you can create your own profile, connect
with other users, and start sharing your brand information with people in your network. You can also
create an exclusive page or section about your company or brand on a social network and invite others to
connect with that page. All this can be done free of charge.
Today, the most important aspect of social
communications is to build and manage
consumer communities around your brand.
However, it is not very easy to attract users to your brand messages. Social media messaging is a highly
specialized job. It is easy to create your social media presence through profiles or pages. But you can
attract other eyeballs toward your brand only with right messaging scheduled at different time periods
while targeting different groups of users.
The number of users connected with your social media page won’t have any significance in the absence
of their engagement with your brand messages. Level of engagement is the only measure to evaluate the
success of your social media-based promotions.
Engagement can be in the form of users’ comments and sharing of your information. Although there are
quantitative tools available to estimate social media engagement, they are not quite effective. A true
impact of your social media campaigns can be measured only with qualitative analysis, which is a very
difficult task.
Although you need not pay for using most social media sites, you can also advertise your brands on them
for which you will have to pay to the social networking service providers. As social media communications
is a highly specialized job, you may have to hire these services though the skills availability is scarce.
While most public social media properties have not yet established their utility for marketers, big
companies have started creating their own private social networks to interact with their buyers and other
stakeholders like channel partners.
Today, the most important aspect of social communications is to build and manage consumer
communities around your brand. So, big brands are managing such communities for all types of brand
communications. They are educating their buyers and resellers by delivering multimedia content through
such private networks. Companies are also offering after-sales support to buyers using these community
networks.
The online communities can be created for customers, resellers, employees, investors, suppliers, etc.
depending on your requirement. And only content can drive these communities.
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