What is Social Media Marketing? A Brief Background...
Word of Mouth was the first form of marketing and it has always been with us. It never stopped being important, but with the advent of mass media, companies began using advertising to help get their message out. When TV and magazines first came along, broadcast advertising was still a novelty and any company that advertised was guaranteed attention; sales soared. Throughout the 1950s, 60s, 70s and even the 80s, people trusted ads as a source of information. But the landscape has changed. Ads are now everywhere. In fact, the average consumer sees 3,000 of them every day.
Marketers now face the following dilemma:
- 14% of people trust ads
- 78% of people trust consumer recommendations
Source: Neilsen Global Trust In Advertising Survey, 2007
...and while consumers still make recommendations face-to-face, the communication landscape has changed.
- Facebook has over 800,000 Australian users, with 100 more joining every hour (Source: News.com.au)
- 74% of Australians are Internet users and around a third of those have Broadband (Source: Internet World Stats)
- Australian Internet users spend more than 20 minutes a day on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace (Source: Hitwise)
- Vogue has 93,000 forum members (Source: Vogue Forums)
- There are more than 400,000 blogs in Australia (Source: The Blog Herald)
- 13 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute (Source: Google)
- 75% of adult Internet users in Australia use social networks (Source: Smart Company)
Word of mouth is now the most effective form of marketing, it just so happens that most of the talking is happening online.
The Internet allows people to voice their opinions, share ideas and make recommendations like never before. They don't care about your ad, but they do care what their friends and heroes think and they're not shy in starting a conversation about it. Social media marketing is about getting out there and starting a dialogue with your customers. You can't make anyone do anything, but if you're prepared to engage the people who love your products and respond to the people who don't, people will love you. If they love you, they will tell their friends about you.
Social Media Marketing is about joining the conversations that are happening about your brand online. It's engaging people in dialogue, listening to feedback, developing relationships built on trust and treating your customers the same way you'd treat your friends. People will be talking about you right now because they love you or hate you; because recommending you to their friends makes them feel smart and important, and because they want to belong to the group of people who identify with your brand's values. Social media marketing is about amplifying the voice of those who love you, and letting those who hate you know that you value their opinion. Once you know who they are, you can give them the tools to amplify their conversations and start reaching people on your behalf.