Fundamentals of Social Media and Social Media Marketing

If success becomes challenging, it’s time to master the fundamentals again.

When studied in Social Media Marketing’s context, this rationale weighs even more truth. Businesses are eager to move into Social Media cosmos, and in their efforts, they are going all out to failure. We see hundreds and thousands of businesses desperately trying to socialize themselves through Facebook pages, LinkedIn profiles, Twitter accounts, Pinterest setups, but no body pays them attention. Time wasted, money burnt and focus lost. You call it unfortunate, we know it as Failure.

Question:Why Businesses fail in Social Media cosmos?

Answer: Absolutely ‘No Planning’ or ‘Poorly though out Planning’ or....... When marketers don’t plan, they plan for failure. And, when marketers plan poorly, they plan to fail audaciously. So, why not to stick to 'Fundamentals' again, and redefine Social Media environment; what social media is all about, how users work here, and what it takes to engage with these users. Fundamentals Make the Market and Market approves fundamentals. Yes, believe it or fail…

Social Media Is Real People – Engage with them Intelligently

Today, social media is deeply woven into people’s lives. It’s more like a consumer generated media where consumers gather to listen, talk and share with one another. They listen to those whom they like and, they talk with those whom they know. They share what they believe to be interesting and they discuss what they what they believe worth spreading.

This behavior is quite similar to that observed in daily lives of people. People, to strangers, are moody and are choosy, they are solemn and they are serious. To strangers, they are cautious, they are conservative.

The more a marketer understands similarities between real social life and online social media life of people, the brighter the prospects of his marketing intelligence become.

Being Real to the People Who are Real is the Real Challenge that Social Media Marketers don’t really want to learn…

Did you ever bother to see what’s common among Successful Social Media campaigns? They all were based on building real relationships with social media audience and, strengthening these relationships through consistent follow ups.

Nobody Wants to be Sold – Build Relationship First and Sell Later

The second most important fact worth learning is, ‘Nobody wants to be Sold and that too, sold right away’. Before digging deeper into this behavior, let’s ask a question.

QuestionSocial Media is, ideally, suitable for drawing

1-Direct Sales
2-Direct Audience

It does not mean that businesses cannot get sales leads from social media at all.  It just means that shifting the focus at ‘Drawing Audience’ will ultimately result in ‘receiving leads’. The moment users figure out that the ‘ROI Equation’ is all that a business is interested in, they would not let them get near or engage with.

As said earlier, ‘No Body Wants to Be Sold’.

Users do not spend their days and nights on social media websites to ‘buy products’. They visit these websites to discover, to explore, to observe, to critique and to share. For successful social media campaign, businesses need building ‘repo’ first.

In Social Media landscape, your services are your second introduction. Your first introduction is your activity; knowledge you share, tips you give, discussions you join and people you engage with. Your actions, interactions, reactions and inactions are monitored by people. The moment you engage with them, the very first thing they do is to see who you are, what you are doing and what people are saying about you. Get your answers ready for your viewers.

Having done this, now spice up your business with latest discounts, sales offers and marketing promotions. This is what we call Socializing Business.It takes time, but it gives REAL results.

Do in Rome What the Romans Do – Not, as Americans do in Afghanistan

A singer is not a singer only; he can be a father, a brother, a friend and a teacher also. Did you get that?

Let me explain what’s this and what’s it to do with our social media marketing. There is a user, say Brian. He has an account with Facebook. He has an account with Twitter as well. Likewise, he has accounts with Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Digg, Tumbler and so on. Brian deals in garments. What he must be doing on all these social networking websites?

It’s wrong if you think that Brian follows same things on these different platforms. Same Brian behaves differently on these different platforms. On Facebook, he must be engaged with his friends, family and relatives, sharing with them light news, entertainment videos, funny images and family event stories. On LinkedIn, Brian must be building his industry relationships, sharing his business intelligence and following business centric information sources. On Pinterest, he must be following latest trends and fresh inventories.  And the story can continue accordingly.

What we learn from Brian, is that, each social platform has its own opportunities, its own challenges and its own dialect, collectively nurturing a particular environment which is suitable for only specific course of actions.

For successful Social Media Marketing , a business must learn to project its image on these different landscapes, accordingly. Again, do in Rome what the Romans do.