Social Media- not just a place to talk to your friends
Social media is an area of marketing that is very popular. Some critics say how can you do effective marketing with social media, and then you hear others say if you are not in the social media arena, you better get into it!
Many surveys that I read spoke about the effectiveness of social media sites and a common point was raised in a lot of these surveys: consumers buy things that their peers/friends/contacts in these social networking sites also buy. The most successful companies are using the networking sites, but ALSO creating interactive advertising that involves the people on the sites. Conducting surveys, questionairs and other brief interactive/conversational marketing tactics. Not only does this type of marketing get the feedback of the people, it allows companies to get some potential word of mouth advertising going. This could be an ideal place where a company rolls out new products and gets the potential momentum for that product, even before it hits the shelves.
Social networking sites are part of the social media craze. Other examples of social media are blogs (like this one), social news sites and sites like youtube. All these sites have something in common- a common place for people to express their thoughts and opinions, yet also read what others are talking about too. How can you go wrong reading some unbiased feedback about a particular subject that you are interested in? The old way of marketing was companies had their websites and you had to take their word everything they said on the website was actually correct.
I would say social media is something that could make or break companies. Therefore, treating customers with the utmost respect is ideal, because if you don’t- you could be all over the next blog entries.
On a final note, I have had a lot of conversations with prospective clients that did their homework before joining the Leadpile marketplace. This “homework” is them visiting various social media sites and reading positive posts about the marketplace. So THANK YOU social media!