This article offers you an overview of different social networks marketing and the relevance of using them in your multi channel marketing actions. Despite the hype surrounding social media, the time has come to start using them at different levels, but with good intelligence. It would be disastrous for the company to use them without setting up a real marketing strategy.

“Social Media” is a generic term that encompasses a very rich and diverse landscape of platforms, websites, and online tools through which people connect, express, interact, comment, and share.

It is used to inform, communicate, entertain and share information and experiences at the private level to interact with businesses. Or better: to interact with the people who work in these companies. And, of course, it’s also used to talk about companies, brands, products, services and about customer experiences.

From a marketing perspective, social networks marketing serves a wide variety of marketing purposes: customer service, conquering markets and customer knowledge, word-of-mouth marketing and inbound marketing, and even direct marketing.

Blogs

Businesses can blog in different ways. They can create a separate blog, more or less separate from the company itself or its website, they can leave the initiative to employees of the company who have something to say and who will create their own blog.

It is better to have a blog in the institutional website or connected to it, in which various stakeholders of the company can express themselves.

The benefits of this approach are enormous: a more open and transparent image, search engine optimization and fast real-time interaction with users – and, in this context, the relevance of the content is an important factor.

Social networks

Social networks offer their users many services to communicate with others, to tell what they are doing, to download images, to share, to exchange e-mails, etc. There are also social networks designed specifically for professionals, the best known of which is undoubtedly LinkedIn.

The goal of social networks marketing is non-aggressive promotion over the medium to long term, through the transformation of contacts into commercial relationships.

The Microblogging

The basic function of Microblogging is to provide the opportunity to exchange short messages with status updates, information and links, to connect to others and to communicate both privately and publicly. Twitter is the best known in this field but it is not the only one.

It can be used for customer service purposes and is an excellent source for tracking brand trends and reputation. In addition, it allows direct contact with pioneers in different fields. Twitter users are often people with some kind of influence: bloggers, journalists, opinion leaders or brand advocates, among others.

Social Bookmarking

One of the most popular bookmarking services is Delicious. Social bookmarking is the online equivalent of the favorites on your computer, which you save to take them out when you need them. Social bookmarking has a sharing dimension, but also serves many other purposes.

Social media sharing platforms

Whether it’s online videos on sites like YouTube, images on Flickr or Power-Point presentations and PDF files on Slideshare, there are dozens of online services where you can download, tagger and share multimedia content. Most of these sites contain integration options that provide other users with the ability to include content, as they deem relevant, on their web pages, social networks, or blogs. The most used sites for marketing are primarily sites with online video, Slideshare and – to a lesser extent – image sharing sites.

Peer Review and Recommendation Platforms

Smart businesses and online retailers or publishers offer their customers the opportunity to comment on their products or content, “vote” and / or recommend them.

However, other online services are also used for these purposes, not to mention the online and offline discussions. In addition, there are hundreds of sites whose sole purpose is to allow users to share their opinions on products, add (and view) reports made for and by their peers, and share their experiences. terms of marks. These sites sometimes have a very large radius of action, most often specific to this or that sector. Of course, you will probably want to focus on those whose sector is related to your business.

Mobile and geolocated social tools

Most of the social media platforms mentioned above can be used on mobile devices. But recently new forms of social networking applications have emerged based on the combination of people, content and location. Foursquare and Gowalla are examples. To these platforms will be added new ones, as well as various mobile social platforms. This is a rapidly growing segment, whose main driver is the increase in smartphone sales with built-in GPS navigator.

As you can see, there are many opportunities to communicate via social media at the web level, yet they must be used wisely.

Tips for tracking social media

• One of the major social media branding activities is to follow what is being said about them, as well as trends and the market. Consider social feedback as an opportunity to optimize your cross-channel marketing in real time.

• Do not be defensive: your client’s opinion matters

• Follow and analyze in a structured and efficient way

• Use the information collected to improve your communication strategy

• Provide the customer with an optimal experience

• Establish a plan for managing your reputation

• Define the resources and structural needs to put it in place

• Listen to feedback and respond appropriately

• Set some guidelines

• Offer people channels to give them feedback

• Keep your lines of communication open

• Measure and improve

• Do not just listen – take action