When marketing online, you design websites, run display banner advertising, publish videos to YouTube, and push your website listings higher up in the search engine rankings to promote and sell products. It’s easy to forget how people actually buy. It’s easy to assume that the potential customers are lonely people crouched over their computers late at night, choosing what products to add to a shopping cart — isolated from the real world and their family and friends.
But in reality, that’s not how people buy online today. It might have been the case in the early days of the web, when the people spending time online were the early adopters and the mavericks, the ones willing to take the risk of putting their credit card numbers into a computer hoping for accurate charges and secure transactions. In those days, few people bought online, and the ones who did were on the fringes of mainstream society.
Those days are over now. With over 300 million people using the web on a regular basis in the United States alone and approximately 3.2 billion users globally, using the Internet has become a mainstream social activity. Consumers approach purchasing online differently, too, and as a result, you need to approach your marketing online differently as well. Your approach must incorporate influence and the different roles that people play in the realm of social media, especially because social media itself has changed over the last decade with the rise of smartphones.
This chapter discusses the fundamentals of social media marketing: what it is, how it works, who the players are, and what it means in the context of your other marketing efforts.
Defining Social Media Marketing
A discussion of any subject needs to begin with a definition, and so here’s the one for social media marketing: Social media marketing (SMM) is a technique that employs social media (content created by everyday people using highly accessible and scalable technologies such as social networks, blogs, micro-blogs, message boards, podcasts, social bookmarks, communities, wikis, and vlogs).
Social media (which has probably been one of the most hyped buzzwords of the last decade) refers to content created and consumed by regular people for each other. It includes the comments a person adds at the end of an article on a website, the family photographs she uploads to a photo-sharing service, the conversations she has with friends in a social network, and the blog posts she publishes or comments on. That’s all social media, and it’s making everyone in the world a content publisher and arbitrator of content. It’s democratizing the web. Facebook, shown in Figure 1-1, is the most popular social network. It allows you to connect with friends and share information in a matter of minutes. Facebook has 2.41 billion monthly active users around the world.
FIGURE 1-1: Facebook is just one example, albeit the largest, of the many media platforms.
Learning about the Roles People Play
To look at the framework of social media marketing, we need to look at the different roles played by those engaged in social media. They are as follows:
Marketers: They publish and share content online to achieve an organization’s marketing and business needs. Today’s marketer looks nothing like the marketers of the twentieth century. Customers now own the brand conversation. The opportunity to interrupt and annoy those customers has dwindled. Customers now meet businesses on their own terms. In the following section, we discuss the new role that marketers have to play.
Influencers: Several types of influencers contribute to the decisions customers make. They may be everyday people who influence the consumer as he makes a purchasing decision. Depending on the decision, the social influencers may be a wife (or husband), friends, peers at work, or even someone the consumer has never even met in real life. Simply put, the people who influence a brand affinity and purchasing decision are the social influencers. They may exert this influence directly by rating products and commenting or by publishing opinions and participating in conversations across the web. Anyone can be a social influencer, influencing someone else’s brand affinity and purchasing decisions, and you, the reader, are probably one, too, without realizing it. We discuss the specific types of influencers in the section “Understanding the role of the influencer.”
Platforms: We used to believe that the social media platforms on which marketers, influencers, and consumers published content were neutral technologies without playing a role in whose content got promoted and shared the most. However, in recent years, the actions of the major social media platforms have shown that their leadership has an active role to play in what gets promoted, shared, and inversely censured on a social media marketing platform. If you’re a small company, their influence may not be noticeable but for larger companies who market and sell many products online, understanding how the platforms and their leaders think about content is important.
Changing roles of the social media marketer
Anyone who has worked in online marketing for a while has watched amazing changes take place. Starting in 1994, one of this book’s authors, Stephanie, worked at AOL, watched that company and other online services help start a social media revolution that continues to change the world. At that time, the other author, Shiv, created his first website using HTML 1.0 and added the ability to comment at the end of each page.
Since then, a lot has changed, and today many marketers are looking for a specific set of rules to follow to be successful. We can assure you that there aren’t any, but there are some guidelines. Following are some of the actions that social media marketers must take if they want their company to compete successfully in the new social marketplace:
Become the top persuader.When you lead an SMM team, you need to understand that persuasion is your most important tool. You persuade your team that you can help its members achieve success, and you persuade your customer to buy your product. Throughout this book, we discuss the role that influence plays in social media and in the art of persuasion. Before you influence, you need to figure out the persuasive message that will sell. When you do that, you can unleash the groups that influence your customers.
Use a variety of distribution channels.The key mistake that some new social media marketers make is to focus solely on social media platforms to carry their message. This does half the job. Although it gets people’s attention, it doesn’t always get them to the sale. For example, imagine