Social Media Integration

 

Social media marketing is believed to have transformed brands like no other communication tactic has done before. It has significantly altered the elementary nature of the relationship between a brand and its prospective customer. 

 

Many popular social media sites such as LinkedIn, Face book and Google+ can serve as efficient platforms for all your social media activities. Photo and video sharing platforms like Flickr, YouTube and Instagram act as storehouses of visual content, which can be effectively circulated via various other channels. And effective blogs content can penetrate any niche-market to efficiently reach the individual target client segments. 

 

But social media should not be considered just as a solo act or as a separate channel. Instead, it should be viewed as a ‘multiplier’ that integrates and augments all the existing marketing strategies to achieve the desired objective. 

 

So instead of instigating social media campaigns, just make all your marketing campaigns social. 

 

 

Twitter should not be considered just as a channel for content marketing, product promotion, customer interaction and/or brand monitoring. Instead, it should form an integral part of your customer service mold and a separate account should be created specifically to cater to all the customer feedback, queries and concerns. The similar approach is quite popular with bigger companies such as Network Solutions and can easily be emulated by all SMEs.

 

 

 

E-mail and social media complement each other. Following are effective ideas to combine both:

 

• Add all the social media icons in your email templates, which link directly to the business social networks, to enable readers to easily access you.
• Include social sharing buttons in your email templates. In case your campaign is liked by someone, all they have to do is to just click those buttons to share it with their friends and/or followers.
• Post your email campaigns regularly to social media. There are email promotion platforms that can automate such processes.
• Transform all your social followers to your email contacts. Marketing platforms for email such as Constant Contact, MailChimp, iContact and Mad Mimi provide signup forms specifically designed to be used on your Facebook.

 

 

Google+ can be a real boon. Many experts believe that content sharing via Google+ can boost higher Google rankings and Google+ is usually searched to access fresh content by numerous Google searchers.

 

 

 

While researching for articles, reporters always seek credible sources, including from social media. Follow them instead of hoping that they will look for you. Regularly share as well as comment on their content to remain in their good books. And most important, create your own content to establish your thought expertise and leadership.

 

 

This is a common practice of advertising among bigger brands. It offers an efficient mechanism to filter, enabling prospective clients to identify their topic based on shared interests. Many social networks have now incorporated hashtags, which is an easy tactic to bring your specific message to your prospects without using any explicit marketing strategy.

 

 

ECommerce businesses often use various types of marketing campaigns such as discounts, contests, seasonal promotions and special offers. Thus, it also makes sense to properly embrace social media along with these campaigns. It can be achieved in various ways:

 

• To reach a bigger audience, promote all your posts via Twitter, Face book and LinkedIn.
• To generate additional attention, craft a LinkedIn Showcase Page or a Face book Page app.
• All contest winners should be featured on your social networks and they should be encouraged to share the same with their friends as well as followers.
• Create hashtags which support promotions and contests.

 

 

Many eCommerce sites are enabled with a built-in customer review and rating feature. And for those that don’t support such a feature, there are numerous 3rd-party applications that can be readily incorporated with the product pages via a fragment of HTML or JavaScript code.

 

 

Usually your existing website content remains there only on your site. It’s better to put it on your social page where it can be located far more easily. You can accomplish this in the following ways:

 

• Place your PowerPoint decks on the Slideshare.
• Post your campaign videos on YouTube.
• Post your campaign photos on Flickr and Facebook.
• Post your campaign related documents on Scribd.
• Place your blog posts on Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.