Online marketing

Social media marketing

Online social media marketing is the engagement with an audience through the use of social media tools. These communication tools invite people to share information and views, or collaborate on projects. Given the growing popularity of social media, particularly in Australia, increasing your organisation’s public engagement via social media marketing is an important element in marketing considerations.

Having a profile (or more specifically, a profile of your brand) on one of these networks, and engaging in online conversations will allow you to track consumer sentiment about your brand, build a broader contact base and drive more traffic to your website. Social media allows you to promote your information, engage in open conversation with your target audience and gives you access to trends and current thinking which may help you refine your products, services, campaigns and events to meet market demands.

Effective use of social media includes maintaining an open dialogue, listening and learning, and being prepared to take negative comments and deal with them in a positive and open manner. People appreciate honesty and responsiveness.

When you engage in social media marketing you need to be prepared for a long-term engagement. Consider instigating conversation and do not necessarily try to control it. Good stories travel.

The benefit of distributing your content or information using social networks is that if your audience finds it interesting they may refer it on to friends and family. Often, information recommended by friends and family will provoke a more positive response than information that is delivered through more formal relationships.

In addition, your content may spread virally beyond your immediate network if you distribute it to your contacts, who then each share that content with their own network and so forth. You are now getting exposure to a growing number of networks and a growing number of people. This way your network, or fan base, will grow, and your next piece of interesting content will reach even further.

Social media conversations cannot be controlled in the same way that a newspaper editor decides what stories to publish or a radio broadcaster decides what songs to play. Social media gives anyone with internet access and a web browser the ability to create content and spread messages. When trying to build and maintain goodwill in social media environments, it is important to familiarise yourself with each social media platform’s terms of use and ‘netiquette’ (internet etiquette—formal and informal rules and principles concerning politeness and manners).

Given the potential benefits of using social media, it is perhaps better for businesses and organisations to accept the potential that at some stage they will attract criticism (whether constructive or otherwise) from users of social media. Monitoring compliments and criticisms in social media conversations can provide valuable information for you in thinking about how to better communicate with your target audience or how to enhance your product and service offerings in the future.

For example, in 2006, Chevrolet ran a social media marketing campaign inviting members of the public to make their own video advertisements for the Tahoe (a large Chevrolet four wheel drive model) using images and audio provided by the company. While the majority of the thousands of Tahoe videos that people made showed the Chevrolet brand in a positive light, others parodied and criticised the Tahoe and Chevrolet. However, the company did not attempt to cover up the more critical responses, and this was seen as a genuine engagement and interaction with their customers.

For more detailed information about different social media platforms, see our social media chapter. Also take a look at our section on options for incorporating social media into your own website.