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What Is Social Marketing?

February 13, 2009 by Hal | 3 comments

Ever wonder about all the buzz surrounding Facebook, Twitter and other social networks as marketing channels? Here’s a brief summary.

The term “social marketing” dates from the 1970’s and originally defined a concept of using marketing for social good. Today, social marketing means employing user-generated channels on the internet to achieve business goals like reaching a broader audience and motivating action.

Social Marketing Channels

Here’s a quick run down of some popular social networks and how businesses are using them as marketing channels:

Facebook - Businesses can create pages, groups and ads. The FB platform is 5 years old and boasts 1 in 5 internet users worldwide.

Twitter - Sometimes called “microblogging,” messages are no more than 140 characters in length and often contain links to more content. Great tool for a real-time interaction with your audience.

LinkedIn - This portal is all about business and networking. Its social tools are still pretty basic, but users can start groups, republish blogs, post status and employ several other useful features.

ActiveRain - A huge community of real estate professionals. Vibrant blogging community.

Flickr - Popular site for serious photographers (amateur and professional). Millions of users. Flickr is both a utility (a convenient way to serve pictures elsewhere on the web) and a social community.

Ning - Build your own social portal. Works well for niche categories.

YouTube - like, Flickr, YouTube is both a utility and a community. YouTube videos can have a profound effect on search results, catapulting your business to the top of page one.

Delicious - Social bookmarking is a way to share collections of links. See an example of how we use this for Julie Roland Realtor.

Blogs - A huge audience gets news and information from blogs, often without knowing it. Blogs provide businesses with a low-cost personal publishing platform that can accomodate text, pictures, video, links and comments. Blogs are easily shared and republished, making them a powerful social marketing platform.

Viral for the Masses

One of the key attributes of the new social media landscape is the opportunity to launch viral marketing initiatives. “Viral” simply means that you are relying upon your audience to circulate your message.

Where viral happened in the past, it was either carefully engineered or largely by accident. Viral marketing remained a small business.

But social channels including Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook all contain built-in features that allow anyone, anytime to start something viral. Example:

  • “Share a link” on Facebook
  • Retweets on Twitter
  • Status messages on LinkedIn

What’s better than getting your audience to circulate your message?

Promote Engagement

Social media, which include blogs, promote engagement between marketers and the audience. It’s important to open up all the potential avenues (while protecting yourself from spam, of course). Make it easy for people to comment, share or email your content.

When people take the opportunity to interact with your brand, they are more likely to return, remember and purchase.

The keys to promoting social engagement:

  • Real people, real names - audiences respond best to real people using their real names. “info@…” doesn’t cut it in social media.
  • Many channels - it’s easy to share your content across many social marketing channels. Enter it once, it appears everywhere. In social marketing, you have to go where your audience congregates, not expect them find you on your outpost in cyberspace.

Those are just a few of the most popular ways businesses are using social marketing. We’d love to hear how you use social marketing to advance your message. Comment here or drop us a note.

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3 comments

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February 13, 2009 at 12:49 pm

Bob Knorpp

First of all, good primer. It’s nice to have an educational resource like this around to those unfamiliar with the medium. Too many “experts” are out there talking up a storm and assuming a level of understanding that most people still do not have.

But in terms of my own situation, I wonder what your thoughts are about podcasts in all of this? While I’d love to classify them as part of the social media spectrum, I find myself considering my podcast a “Downloadable Internet Radio.” It’s essentially a downstream medium that it is not engaging. Yet at the same time, it inspires much interaction in the other venues, like Twitter, so it’s not entirely one-way.

The other thing I’d love to discuss is the role of forums. They’ve been around for so long (frankly, they’re just the evolution of the BBSs) they get overlooked in most of the commentary I see on the social media frontier. And yet, to me they represent the most fertile ground of social media interaction since they are pre-targeted audience-wise and topic segmented down to discussions that may pertain to you and your brand. Thoughts?

Good piece! Recommend it highly.

February 13, 2009 at 1:04 pm

Mike Jaquish

“Real people, real names…”
One heckuva start.

Stealth marketing says, “You share first. Maybe I will reciprocate.” to potential clients and customers.

It breeds empowerment when consumers cna unilaterally become familiar with the people with whom they may do business.
I like to think that a good service provider proactively empowers his/her prospective clientele!

February 13, 2009 at 1:50 pm

Jason Peck

“Real people, real names” is definitely a key here. As we saw with brands such as Sony and Walmart, trying to architect your way to success using fake accounts/stories doesn’t work in the social media world. I think you do a good job here of explaining some of the tools marketers can use to get their message out. But social media is a two-way street; you can learn a lot more about your customers, gain respect and improve your business even more if you actively listen and engage people using these sites/tools, instead of just using them as avenues to spread your own messages.