DigitalMarketing Notes-4
DigitalMarketing Notes-4
DigitalMarketing Notes-4
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Unit – IV
Social Media Marketing
What is Social Media Marketing, Seven Myths of SMM, Characteristics of Successful Social
Media Marketer, Social Media Marketing Plan, Social Media marketing Tools, Publishing Blogs,
Podcast and Webinars, Social Media Monitoring, Social Media: Facebook, Twitter.
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Social media marketing includes activities like posting text and image updates, videos, and and
other content that drives audience engagement, as well as paid social media advertising.
➢ The goal of SMM is to produce content that users will share with their social network to
help a company increase brand exposure and broaden customer reach.
➢ One of the key components of SMM is social media optimization (SMO). Like search
engine optimization (SEO), SMO is a strategy for drawing new and unique visitors to a
website. SMO can be done two ways: adding social media links to content, such
as RSS feeds and sharing buttons - or promoting activity through social media by
updating statuses or tweets, or blog posts.
➢ SMM helps a company get direct feedback from customers (and potential customers)
while making the company seem more personable. The interactive parts of social media
give customers the opportunity to ask questions or voice complaints and feel they are
being heard. This aspect of SMM is called social customer relationship management
(social CRM).
➢ SMM became more common with the increased popularity of websites such
as Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, and YouTube. In response, the Federal Trade
Commission (FTC) has updated its rules to include SMM. If a company or its advertising
agency provides a blogger or other online commenter with free products or other
incentives to generate positive buzz for a product, the online comments will be treated
legally as endorsements. Both the blogger and the company will be held responsible for
ensuring that the incentives are clearly and conspicuously disclosed, and that the
blogger's posts contain no misleading or unsubstantiated statements and otherwise
complies with the FTC's rules concerning unfair or deceptive advertising.
Social media marketing (SMM) refers to techniques that target social networks and applications
to spread brand awareness or promote particular products. Social media marketing campaigns
usually center around:
• Establishing a social media presence on major platforms
• Creating shareable content and advertorials
• Cultivating customer feedback throughout the campaign through surveys and contests
Social media marketing is perceived as a more targeted type of advertising and is therefore
believed to be very effective in creating brand awareness.
The good news is that should you need a bit of a crash course in social media, you can team
up with a social media consultant to help you learn the ropes. There are also hundreds of
informative articles and how-tos online that you can use as references. No matter which route
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you go however, it’s always important to know and understand what social media can and cannot
do for your business so that you can manage your expectations and establish achievable
objectives.
The social media myths that we’ll be discussing today are actually quite common. There are lots
of people who believe that these illusions are achievable and they expect their digital marketing
agency to deliver these ridiculous goals. Let’s get these out of the way.
5. Myth Five: Publish the same type of content to get more views.
If you use effective analytics tools like Cyfe and Buffer, you’ll be able to get an insight
on the type of content that gets the most engagement and activity. A lot of people
mistakenly think that they should publish the same type of content over and over again to
replicate these results. Big no-no. Instead of sharing the same article and links day in and
day out, add some variety to your content strategy. Give your followers a good reason to
check your pages everyday.
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Cleverly space out your publishing schedule and don’t over do it. Take the time to sift
through your content and select the best and most relevant ones to share on your pages.
Social media can be a fun and effective way to reach your customers on a more personal level.
Social media networks are mode of social interaction. It is a platform of sharing and discussing
information among human beings. Social media can include text, audio, video, images, podcasts
and other multimedia communication elements. Social media sites are nothing but a group of
special and user friendly websites.
Social Media Marketing is a very broad term. It is a technique of building a business using
various social media networks. For instance, videos and blogs that gives exposure to your
company.
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When someone talks about social media marketing people often think that they may be talking
about Facebook and Twitter. But social media networks also offer effective marketing tools that
can bring more traffic to your website and improve your online popularity. Social media
marketing has many characteristics. To attain a good marketing strategy, you need to have a look
at the following SMM characteristics.
➢ Participation
Social media encourages contributions and feedback from everyone. Social media
includes delivery of ideas at the time of online conversation. It tries to bridge the gap
between companies and audience. With all the new channels of social media, people are
enjoying this process of participation.
➢ Openness
Social media success requires honesty, transparency and authenticity. You should
maintain a trust worthy relationship with your customers in your SMM (social media
marketing) strategy. One fake or negative comment can destroy your online reputation.
➢ Build relationships
Social media is a two-way communication channel. It requires participation from both
companies and customers. As a business owner, it is very important to make good
connections with your target audience. Online conversation through various social media
tools happen in real time with real people. You get a chance to interact with your target
audience and you can answer to their queries. Answering to their queries is a good way to
build relationship with customers.
➢ Reliability
To make your profile reliable, you need to consistently show your online presence.
Effective social media marketer visits their targeted sites regularly. They also get
involved with new users and promote their products. They talk to their target audience on
a regular basis.
➢ Build communities
Social media sites allow you to build communities quickly, this helps you communicate
more effectively. Communities share common interests, such as a love of photography, a
political issue or a favorite TV show. These communities help you to know about your
target audience. You can also support other communities which you think are good for
your business.
➢ Customer service
It is very essential to take care of your customers. Social media networks are all about
helping each others. It’s about providing value to your customers, not just promotion.
➢ Avoid spamming
Don’t give importance only to promoting your links. Also share insightful content about
your company. Do not send the same message to your community again and again, it
works as a spam and it may irritate your customers.
Social media marketing is the most powerful platform for small businesses. An effective social
media marketing campaign grows your business and brings more traffic to your website. Social
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media marketing is the best marketing strategy allows you to promote your company at the same
time build relationships.
Start With a Plan - Before we begin creating social media marketing campaigns, consider your
business’s goals. Starting a social media marketing campaign without a social strategy in mind is
like wandering around a forest without a map—you might have fun, but you'll probably get lost.
Here are some questions to ask when defining your social media marketing goals:
➢ What are you hoping to achieve through social media marketing?
➢ Who is your target audience?
➢ Where would your target audience hang out and how would they use social media?
➢ What message do you want to send to your audience with social media marketing?
Social media marketing can help with a number of goals, such as:
➢ Increasing website traffic
➢ Building conversions
➢ Raising brand awareness
➢ Creating a brand identity and positive brand association
➢ Improving communication and interaction with key audiences
The bigger and more engaged your audience is on social media networks, the easier it will be for
you to achieve every other marketing goal on your list!
While social media marketing can provide benefits, it also can create obstacles that companies
may not have had to deal with otherwise. For example, a viral video claiming that a company’s
product causes consumers to become ill must be addressed by the company, regardless of
whether the claim is true or false. Even if a company is able to set the message straight,
consumers may be less likely to purchase from the company in the future.
➢ Social Media Content Planning — building a social media marketing plan is essential.
Consider keyword research and competitive research to help brainstorm content ideas that
will interest your target audience.
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➢ Great Social Content — Consistent with other areas of online marketing, content reigns
supreme when it comes to social media marketing. Make sure you post regularly and offer
truly valuable information that your ideal customers will find helpful and interesting. The
content that you share on your social networks can include social media images, videos,
infographics, how-to guides and more.
➢ A Consistent Brand Image — Using social media for marketing enables your business to
project your brand image across a variety of different social media platforms. While each
platform has its own unique environment and voice, your business’s core identity, whether
it's friendly, fun, or trustworthy, should stay consistent.
➢ Social Media for Content Promotion — Social media marketing is a perfect channel for
sharing your best site and blog content with readers. Once you build a loyal following on
social media, you'll be able to post all your new content and make sure your readers can find
new stuff right away. Plus, great blog content will help you build more followers. It's a
surprising way that content marketing and social media marketing benefit each other.
➢ Sharing Curated Links — While using social media for marketing is a great way to
leverage your own unique, original content to gain followers, fans, and devotees, it’s also an
opportunity to link to outside articles as well. If other sources provide great, valuable
information you think your target audience will enjoy, don’t be shy about linking to
them. Curating and linking to outside sources improves trust and reliability, and you may
even get some links in return.
➢ Measuring Success with Analytics —You can’t determine the success of your social media
marketing strategies without tracking data. Google Analytics can be used as a great social
media marketing tool that will help you measure your most triumphant social media
marketing techniques, as well as determine which strategies are better off abandoned. Attach
tracking tags to your social media marketing campaigns so that you can properly monitor
them. And be sure to use the analytics within each social platform for even more insight into
which of your social content is performing best with your audience.
Here are few steps to follow in Social Media Marketing Plan of Action.
Step 1: Create Social Media Marketing Goals That Solve Your Biggest Challenges
➢ The first step to any strategy is to understand what you want out of your efforts. Social
media marketing isn’t about flipping a switch and calling it a day. Instead, social media
planning should be looked at like cooking your favorite dish.
➢ That’s why creating goals is so critical to the first part of your social media strategy. At
the same time, it’s best to set goals that you know are attainable. Asking for 1 million
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new Instagram followers in 2018 is unrealistic. With achievable goals, you’re more likely
to stick to the original plan and continue to take on new hurdles as you complete old
ones.
➢ This is the same reason why brands should never take on every social media channel
possible in their current marketing strategy. Try to choose the channels that have the most
importance based on your brand’s goals. Avoid over complicating a strategy with too
many targets and objectives. Simplicity can take you a long way.
➢ And also, don’t forget to document your social media goals. Not only is it important to
help you benchmark where you are, but it also improves your chances of achieving them.
Goal setting is a staple of all marketing and business strategies. Social media is no exception. Of
course, with a range of social capabilities, it can be difficult to determine exactly what your
objectives should be. For guidance, here are some common social media goals to consider:
• Increase brand awareness: To create authentic and lasting brand awareness, avoid a
slew of promotional messages. Instead, focus on meaningful content and a strong brand
personality through your social channels.
• Higher quality of sales: Digging through your social channels is nearly impossible
without monitoring or listening to specific keywords, phrases or hashtags. Through
more efficient social media targeting, you reach your core audience much faster.
• Drive in-person sales: Some retailers rely on social media marketing efforts to drive in-
store sales. Is your brand promoting enough on social to reward those who come to you?
What about alerting customers to what’s going on in your stores?
• Improve ROI: There’s not a brand on social media that doesn’t want to increase its
return on investment. But on social, this goal is specific to performing a thorough audit
of your channels and ensuring cost of labor, advertisements and design stay on track.
• Create a loyal fanbase: Does your brand promote user-generated content? Do your
followers react positively without any initiation? Getting to this point takes time and
effort with creating a positive brand persona on social.
• Better pulse on the industry: What are your competitors doing that seems to be
working? What strategies are they using to drive engagement or sales? Having a pulse on
the industry could simply help you improve your efforts and take some tips from those
doing well.
Approximately 79% of adults use Facebook–but are your customers actively engaging with
your brand there? Understanding your audience is necessary to learn things like who buys your
products, what age group is the toughest to sell and what income level makes up the most of your
returning customers? As for social media, it’s just as critical to know your audience.
First, your brand should look into the demographics of your most valuable social channels. Like
we mentioned before, you should have a goal in mind for your social media marketing strategy.
This is why you need to research the channels that correlate the most with your goals.
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To help you find your focus channels: let’s take a quick look at the essential demographics data
for each major network:
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Identifying Customer Demographics
While the demographics data above gives you insight into each channel, what about your own
customers? Further analysis has to be completed before you can truly know your customer
demographics on social media.
That’s why many brands use a social media dashboard that can provide an overview of who’s
following you and how they interact with you on each channel. Most brands today are using at
least some sort of dashboard. However, does your dashboard address your specific goals?
Whether you’re an agency providing insights for your clients or an enterprise company
discovering your own demographics, an all-in-one dashboard solution is critical.
Sprout Social prides itself on the in-depth and essential demographics data for your social
networks to help you identify your customers. Learn more with a free 30-day trial to uncover
crucial data with Sprout!
While your targeted social media metrics might be the most important step of a strategy, it’s
often the spot most veer off the path. We often get wrapped up in viewing followers and likes as
the truth to a campaign, but it’s smart to take a step back and evaluate the social metrics
associated with your overall goals.
Large audiences and likable content is absolutely great, but here are some other metrics you
might want to pursue in 2018:
• Reach: Post reach is the number of unique users who saw your post. How far is your
content spreading across social? Is it actually reaching user’s feeds?
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• Clicks: This is the amount of clicks on your content, company name or logo. Link clicks
are critical toward understanding how users move through your marketing funnel.
Tracking clicks per campaign is essential to understand what drives curiosity or
encourages people to buy.
• Engagement: The total number of social interactions divided by number of impressions.
For engagement, it’s about seeing who interacted and if it was a good ratio out of your
total reach. This sheds light on how well your audience perceives you and their
willingness to interact.
• Hashtag performance: What were your most used hashtags on your own side? Which
hashtags were most associated with your brand? Or what hashtags created the most
engagement?
• Sentiment: This is the measurement of how users reacted to your content, brand or
hashtag. Did customers find your recent campaign offensive? What type of sentiment are
people associating with your campaign hashtag? It’s always better to dig deeper and find
what people are saying.
• Organic and paid likes: More than just standard Likes, these likes are defined from paid
or organic content. For channels like Facebook, organic engagement is much harder to
gain traction, which is why many brands turn to Facebook Ads. However, earning
organic likes on Instagram isn’t quite as difficult.
Before you start creating content (we promise we’re almost there!), it’s really smart to
investigate your competitors. We put this before the content creation process because you often
find new ways to look at content by analyzing what’s making your competitors successful.
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Again, we’ll always believe you shouldn’t steal your competitors’ ideas, but instead learn and
grow from their success and failures. So how do you find that information? The first step is to
find out who’s your competition in the first place.
The simplest way to find competitors is through a simple Google search. Look up your most
valuable keywords, phrases and industry terms to see who shows up.
Here you can see post break downs of text, images and video to see what your competitors are
doing to drive the most engagement. Once you dig through the competitive analysis, you’ll have
a better idea of what your potential customers want.
Did someone say content? It’s no lie–social media content is extremely important to your
marketing strategy. However, it’s best to follow the previous steps before planning out content
(we caught you, blog skippers!) so you can start building more effective themes.
For starters, we recommend creating content that fits to your brand’s identity. This means you
should avoid things like reaching out to your unpopular demographics without a complete
strategy in place.
It’s necessary to find the perfect balance between target content and being overly promotional as
well. In fact, 46% of users say they’ll unfollow a brand if there’s too many promotional
messages. Additionally, 41% of users say they’d unfollow a brand that shared too much
irrelevant content.
How important is video to your social media marketing strategy? Extremely–approximately 90%
of online shoppers believe product videos help them make a purchasing decision. Additionally,
the average online video is completely watched end to end by 37% of viewers.
These type of stats should only enforce your reasoning to invest in social media video content.
Brands can reach users through Instagram Stories, Facebook Live and other in-the-moment
media.
One of the toughest challenges to visual content is creating it on a day-to-day basis. A Venngage
infographic showed 36.7% of marketers said their No.1 struggle with creating visual content
was doing so consistently.
This truly shows how important highly-visual content is to marketers and the people they want to
reach. That’s why building content themes is a great approach to sectioning out your content.
Instagram is one your premier channels to work off visual themes.
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Social media channels are built as networks. This means their main purpose is to be a space to
converse, discuss topics and share content. Your brand can’t forget these core elements of
“networking” and it takes effort to ensure conversations or engagement opportunities aren’t left
unattended.
Through social media, you gain respect as a brand by just being present and talking to your
audience. That’s why social customer care is so important to brands wanting to increase
audience awareness. It’s all about engagement.
Designating teams to specific tasks can help your staff run like a well-oiled social media team,
whether you’re a group of one or 100.
When is your brand available to engage and interact with customers? You might see some
recommending times to post late in the evening. But if your brand isn’t there to communicate,
what’s the point of posting at the preferred time?
Instead, try to ensure your social media or community managers are available and ready to
answer any product questions or concerns when you tweet or post. It’s smart to learn the best
times to post on social media, but it’s just as critical to engage after posting.
According to our Index, a brand’s average response time is around 10 hours. But did you know
that most users believe brands should respond to social media messages within four hours?
With all the updated algorithms, organic content has a tough time reaching the majority of your
audience. The last thing you want to do is ignore those who engage and lose out on sending more
down your marketing funnel.
So, how well did you do on your social media marketing strategy? Without continuously
analyzing your efforts, you’ll never know how one campaign did over another. Having a bird’s-
eye-view of your social media activity helps put things into perspective.
You’ve got down your most important goals, network preferences and metrics–now it’s time to
make sure you made the right decisions. Knowing you’ve made the right choices is still a
difficult task in social media.
In fact, 46% of B2B marketers are unsure if their social strategy actually created revenue for
their brand. But marketers are always trying and looking for the perfect connection. That’s why
the most commonly used metric (80%) for marketers is engagement.
If you work at building lasting relationships, there’s a lot less room for failure with your social
media marketing strategy.
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Use a Tool to Track Success
Sprout Social was created with social media marketing in mind. Our social media tools offer
a full suite of analytics and reporting features to help you pinpoint exactly which posts, messages
and hashtags perform the best.
It’s easy to connect other critical tools to our dashboard like Google Analytics, which helps you
see which posts drove the most traffic, conversions and overall revenue.
In today’s world, social media is one of the best ways for your business to stand out in its field
and to reach a wider audience. Having an active presence on all major social networks, from
Facebook to LinkedIn and beyond, is a necessity for any brand that wants to become an industry
leader while engaging with its potential and current customers in new ways.
However, social media can be overwhelming if you don’t have the proper knowledge or tools.
Whether it’s to create or repurpose content, to find the best way to engage with your online
community or to create a comprehensive posting schedule, having the right social media
management tools is crucial to your success. Here are few of the best social media management
tools currently available and how they can help you make the most of your social presence.
1. HootSuite
Whether you are a user handling multiple accounts, or an agencythat handles
hundreds, HootSuite makes it easy. It’s easy to add accounts, easy to schedule posts
across all major platforms and easy to add account managers. In addition, the company
also has a robust training platform that teaches not just the tools, but how to think about
social marketing as a whole.
2. Hubspot
While there are a lot of tools out there that let you monitor and publish to social accounts,
we recommend platforms such as Hubspot where you can not only monitor and publish
but also get closed-loop reporting data. That means you're not just seeing what channels
drive the most engagement, but you can track further down the funnel to see what posts
and channels drive actual leads and sales.
3. MeetEdgar
There are countless tools that post for you and schedule posts but what about a system
that re-shares evergreen posts? MeetEdgar is the one because it has the biggest impact on
traffic by automatically re-sharing your evergreen content.
4. TweetDeck
TweetDeck has been around a long time now, and there's a reason for that: It's one of the
best and best-priced (what can beat free?) ways out there to be a part of the
Twittersphere. The multi-columned layout makes it easy to follow several conversations
at once, and scheduling content is a snap. Twitter moves so fast, but TweetDeck makes it
doable and even enjoyable.
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5. IFTTT
IFTTT, or “If This Then That,” is a great automation tool that can help you save a lot of
time on trying to manage social media platforms, apps and websites. The tool can link
these services together based on a trigger and an action. Based on the trigger you create,
it will start an action. For example, if you publish a blog (the trigger), then IFTTT will
automate and create a tweet (the action).
6. Buffer
I’m a fan of Buffer. It lets you schedule and manage social media posts across all of the
most widely used channels, and you can individually customize each post for all of the
different platforms it gets posted to. Buffer also shares your content at the best possible
times throughout the day and tracks links so that you can see what content gets the most
traction.
7. Sprout Social
Our digital team utilizes Sprout Social for its social media management, which allows the
team members to monitor clients’ social media mentions, engage with brand advocates,
schedule content in advance, and utilize reporting tools to inform future strategies. As our
hotel clients’ guests view social media as a virtual concierge, we find it essential to have
a tool to streamline real-time communication.
8. Canva
What you can do with Canva: design presentations, social media graphics, and a heap of
other things with thousands of beautiful layouts. It has everything you need for catching
designs. Millions of stock photographs, vectors and illustrations. You can also upload
your own visuals. Canva has preset filters and advanced photo editing tools to modify
pictures. It gives you the possibility to use icons, shapes and elements, thousands of them.
Hundreds of fonts perfect for every design are also ready to go and accessible within
Canva.
9. Adobe Post
Adobe Post was created to give you a powerful tool to differentiate among the
competitors and engage your followers with eye-catching posts. Create stunning social
graphics in seconds with it. Get started quickly with handcrafted remixable design
templates made for social sharing. Resize your text - beautiful typography will be
automatically applied on-the-fly. Transform your text and photo into professional-looking
graphics with a single tap.
11. Babbly
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Babbly is an awesome platform of quality content owners. It works as simple as follows:
give a share - get a share. Share others content to get shares to your content. Share to
multiple networks at once by just one click. Pause & play your content. Control when
your content is visible to others on Babbly. Control when your content goes live.
Schedule your posts. Schedule when your posts go live on babbly and your social media.
The tool helps you in reaching the target audience at the right time. Relax and don’t
worry about flooding your follower base again. Auto spread shares to your social
networks to go out in timed intervals.
12. Feedly
Organize, read, and share all the content that matters to you and your team at a single
place. Don't miss a beat from any of the publications you trust. Dive deeper by following
blogs from the latest movers, shakers, and thinkers. Follow any one on the web. See new
videos from the YouTube channels you follow. Monitor news about your company, your
product, your craft, and your competitors by plugging in Google Alerts. Crunch through
more content in less time by organizing your feeds into easy-to-read collections. Secure
access to private content from your company's internal portals, content management
systems, and SaaS applications. Let the web work for you by arranging the content you
rely on into easy-to-read collections. And do much more with Feedly.
14. Brand 24
The tool is paid, but has a 14-day free trial period. It serves for getting social insights.
Discover what people are saying online about your brand. Brand24 gives you instant
access to mentions about your brand across the web, from social networks to influential
publishers. Therefore you can reach customers fast, react and engage quickly to real-time
comments made about your brand, follow-up on positive comments from your brand
ambassadors, or respond to a dissatisfied customer before the story gets ahead of you.
Detect sales opportunities. 80% of consumers do research or ask online before making a
buying decision. Brand24 gives you the listening tools to find these leads, identify where
to promote products and find customers before they find you.
15. CrowdBooster
The tool offers a 30-day free trial. Measure & optimize your social media marketing with
it. Improve your online presence. Have the right tools to make data-driven decisions.
Save time on reporting, get real-time data that's always up-to-date, quickly report your
key performance metrics, share them with your dashboard. Export graphs & tables, their
dashboard creates editable, beautiful graphs & tables for you to view. You can export to
CSV then drop the raw data in your own custom report. Schedule unlimited tweets posts
for the most optimal time. The tool recommends the best time for you to get the most
engagement out of your followers and fans. Find your most engaged fans & followers,
learn to quickly adapt to your audience. CrowdBooster’s technology provides your
audience insight, suggests who you should engage with, and how to improve the content.
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Publishing Blogs, Podcast and Webinars:
Publishing Blogs:
A blog is basically a 'weblog', a kind of website, a journal that is updated regularly. It is a
discussion platform besides being a content achieve. People can discuss a topic on a blog and
comment on posts. It is basically run by an individual or a small group.
Blogging
Every activity and skillset that is required to manage a blog comes under the purview of
Blogging, for example, writing posts, publishing them, designing, social marketing, etc. In
simple words, blogging is the process of adding new content to a blog and updating it at regular
intervals.
➢ Blogger (Person) − Person involved in blogging is called a 'blogger'.
➢ Blogger (Service) − It is a service provided by Google that allows us to compose a post,
edit, update, and manage it. You can customize your blogs easily with the help of a
'blogger'. It lets you share what is on your mind and earn money. It is a convenient
platform for avid as well as novice users. No technical knowledge or coding is required.
It runs directly on Google servers and is impossible to hack.
➢ WordPress − It’s a free software to create and customize a search engine friendly
website or a blog. A number of themes and plugins are available to transform your
website as required. Approximately 70 million people are a part of WordPress
community. WordPress is available in both free and premium plans.
➢ Blogspot − Blogspot is a free web hosting service gifted to web developers by Google. It
helps Google Blogger in delivering its service. We cannot use any other platform to use
it.
➢ Tumbler − It is a microblogging platform that allows us to make a blog and customize
it. We may use stories, images, videos, audio, etc. Bloggers can either keep their blogs
private or follow other blogs.
Advantages of Blogging
✓ Better online influence. It assists in making impressions in grabbing a good profile.
✓ It forms a good source of income. Pat Flynn earns $100,000 per year from his blog
'Green Exam Academy'.
✓ Maintaining a blog can help improve your writing skills.
✓ A blogger can easily become a published author.
✓ You can get instant feedbacks in the form of comments, shares, etc.
✓ Bloggers can be sound learners, as they tend to read and engage more in such content.
✓ Get a long fan following list.
✓ Blogs can help you build a strong network.
✓ Maintaining a blog can help you improve your technical skills on Wordpress, SEO, etc.
✓ Sell Online − Blogs can be a great virtual store.
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✓ Express yourself − Blogging is a great way to share your ideas through inspirational
means.
✓ Blogging is an easy, yet a sure way to build trust online.
Setting a Blog using WordPress
You can create blogs on many platforms. They can be either free or paid. Here is how you can
create a blog using WordPress −
• Create your account on WordPress.com. Enter your name and Email address and other
required details.
• Select a web address; it can be either free or premium.
• Choose a suitable WordPress plan.
• Set up your profile and build your profile page.
• Configure site settings like Site Title and tagline.
Podcast:
A podcast is a digital audio file that is made available via Web syndication technologies such as
RSS. Although strictly speaking, it’s not social media, it’s often classified as such because it
allows anybody to easily syndicate their own audio content. You can use podcasts as a way to
share information with your audiences. Podcasts typically don’t form a whole SIM campaign in
and of themselves, but work well with other SIM ones.
➢ Podcasting is the preparation and distribution of audio files using RSS to the computers
of subscribed users. These files may then be uploaded to digital music or multimedia
players like the iPod. A podcast can be easily created from a digital audio file. The
podcaster first saves the file as an MP3 and then uploads it to the Web site of a service
provider. The MP3 file gets its own URL, which is inserted into an RSS XML document
as an enclosure within an XML tag.
➢ Once a podcast has been created, it can be registered with content aggregators, such as
podcasting.net or ipodder.org, for inclusion in podcast directories. People can browse
through the categories or subscribe to specific podcast RSS feeds which will download to
their audio players automatically when they next connect. Although podcasts are
generally audio files created for digital music players, the same technology can be used to
prepare and transmit images, text, and video to any capable device.
➢ Podcasting has been likened to TiVo because it allows users to listen to their selected
podcasts whenever they like, similarly to the way time-shifting lets viewers watch
television programs when it suits them. Furthermore, because of the portability of the
player devices, users can listen to audio files from the Internet as they go about their daily
activities - for example, listening to a news blog entry while at the gym, commuting, or
just walking around.
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➢ The cultural milieu supporting podcasting is sometimes referred to as the podosphere,
just as the cultural environment surrounding the blog is called the blogosphere.
Webinars:
Webinars are taking the digital marketing world by storm. Also known as web conferencing,
webinars are services that allow real-time, multicast video conferencing or audio conferencing
events to occur even when participants come from remote locations. These are made possible
through online technologies like TCP/IP. Some great examples of oft-cited webinar services
include Google Hangouts, and ClickMeeting.
Many people today consider webinar as the next big thing in marketing since it offers real-time
connectivity and interaction between the presenter or presenters plus guests and the audience that
are interacting with them.
Importance of webinar marketing is growing rapidly nowadays. Webinars have quickly become
the standard for the new marketing culture of so called “permission marketing.” For ones who
are not familiar with the term, permission marketing is based, in short, on the knowing
participation of potential consumers in the marketing process. Consumers do this because they
think the marketing materials will help them in their business or personal attempts.
➢ There is no area that webinars cannot be helpful at. Almost any subject that you can think
of can provide webinars through you can learn a lot. And they are aimed at all sorts of
audiences, from clients to colleagues.
➢ However, the amount of knowledge and values vary from one area to another, for
example you will probably get more following tech webinars than ones form another
sector, but knowledge can be useful anyways. Therefore, no matter what industry you
are at, you should definitely consider getting involved in them.
➢ Another positive aspect that makes webinars so important is how easy they are to use.
Organizing webinar doesn't require nether the most advanced technology nor any other
special requirement. Webinars don’t require the time or expense of travel. It is based on
the most simplest form, sharing your knowledge with others in fast and easy way.
Therefore, all you have to do is to be an expert in certain area and provide the
information that you audience needs in order for your webinar to be a success.
➢ Nowadays, due to so many information that are circulating all around us, consumers are
getting smarter and started to demand knowledge instantly. Instead of searching for the
right books or getting in touch to people from certain field, consumers are interested in
getting the information the easiest way possible. So the Internet search seems like the
most logical step. For that reason, your company or your personal project should be
promoted there so that it can been reached faster then others. There is no better way to
demonstrate your expertise or communicate to potential clients than promoting your
brand or idea online.
➢ Your goal should be to provide all necessary information so that clients have the whole
picture of what are you offering. And webinars seem simplest than writing a long posts or
articles that no one probably have a time to go through.
➢ Today, it's not enough to have listeners, you will need more active audience who would
be able to spread information about your project everywhere. Therefore, try to keep them
involved by appreciating and encouraging their feedback, answering their questions in a
reasonable amount of time, incorporating them in your future marketing materials. That's
how you can get the most of your webinar.
1. Webinars are Convenient: On-demand webinars are quite convenient to have because
at this point, everyone has an online connection and a means to access it.
2. Webinars Can Help with Your Promotions: If you want to promote your site or
company with the help of webinars, then it’s all possible. Webinar presentations, even
informational ones, can increase the exposure of your business or company altogether.
3. Webinars Establish Your Credibility: By having a webinar, you’ll be able to give more
credibility to your ideas. The simple act of putting on webinars will allow you, the people
you’re talking to, and the people who are watching, to understand your concepts and
establish agreements.
4. Webinars Have Huge Applications on Training and Education: Webinar live streams
and webcasts can include how-to videos that showcase training in various fields of study
and concepts.
5. Webinars Can Create and Increase Brand Awareness: Brand awareness is a concept
that involves making audiences more aware of a brand or product through consistent
promotion, advertisements, marketing, and labeling focused on a single theme, message,
or identity.
7. Webinars Helps Build You a Bigger Audience and Contact List: Just like with
podcasts or simply having a YouTube channel, every webinar you made forges new
contacts.
8. Webinars Are Cost-Effective Solutions: Webinars aren’t that much expensive and
some of them are even available for free.
To qualify for inclusion in the Social Media Monitoring category, a product must:
• Listen for specific mentions across social media
• Identify trending topics or phrases
• Detail customer sentiment
• Organize customer information
• Identify thought leaders and influencers
•
1. Better Understanding of Listening & Monitoring - Another way social media monitoring
can benefit your business is by learning the difference between monitoring and social listening.
Far too often, the terms social media monitoring and social media listening are considered one in
the same.
While it’s easy to see why they’re mixed together, monitoring and listening are both unique
methods to view, measure and analyze your audience. Here’s how we break down the difference
between monitoring and listening:
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• Social media monitoring is more so the process of collecting social messages into a
single stream and to take a specific action in response to each message (via a like,
comment or tasked message).
• Social media listening queries large volumes of social messages from specific keywords
or topics that then requires your brand to reflect and draw analysis from the these actions.
Understanding the difference between social media monitoring and social media listening is
critical to any social strategy. It’s also important to know one is not more important than the
other.
Social media monitoring tools allow brands to become more approachable by finding customer
inquiries and interactions faster.
Positive brand experiences can truly have an effect on customers in your sales funnel. It’s always
best to think of building strong communication with your customers as a long-term relationship.
And what’s the best way to open that line of communication? It starts with monitoring your
social messages and providing the best customer experience.
And for a lot of brands, there are so many messages, it’s easy to miss important questions
because they didn’t tag, @mention or use your hashtag. However, identifying your brand
keywords in a social media monitoring platform, like Sprout Social, makes it simple.
You’ll never miss an incoming message, hashtag, mention or even common misspellings by
monitoring brand keywords and hashtags. Not only does this help you put all your incoming
brand messages in one place, you can also analyze hashtag performance and see how users
interact with your brand materials on social.
By identifying relevant keywords on social, you open yourself up to new discussions, blog and
social media post ideas and see what topics your audience truly engages with the most.
An essential benefit of social media monitoring tools is the ability to organize campaigns. When
incoming messages related to an important campaign come in, you need to be able to respond or
engage in a timely manner. Start by setting up a brand keyword in Sprout that’s associated with a
specific campaign.
With the brand keyword saved, you’ll be able to filter all incoming Tweets or Instagram hashtags
with that specific phrase. For brands that receive a large volume of incoming messages for
Not only that, but it also guarantees that important messages don’t get overlooked.
With the help of social media monitoring tools, you easily interact with influencers and brand
advocates to truly move the engagement needle. On top of that, monitoring interactions and
conversations from key customers can provide valuable instances of ways to include them in
your marketing efforts.
Finding places to interact with key customers can make the difference between a small sale and a
major win for your business. With monitoring tools, you can find and reply to those customers
on the edge to make a purchase from you.
Consider monitoring conversations that contain the names of your top competitors on social. For
instance, T-Mobile might want to track conversations about Verizon. It could help them
understand some of the pain points of Verizon customers. Then T-Mobile could use these
Verizon customer issues in its own marketing messaging to speak more directly to the audience.
Don’t let negative customer experiences go unnoticed on social media. While some bigger
brands receive hundreds or thousands of messages a day, the right monitoring tool helps you dig
through the noise and find the biggest issues to address.
Facebook:
History of Facebook
Facebook was founded by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg on February 4, 2004. In May 2007,
Facebook opened up its developer platform to allow third-party developers to build applications
and widgets that, once approved, could be distributed through the Facebook community. In May
2008, Facebook engineers announced Facebook connect, a cross-site initiative that allows users
to publish on third-party sites in their Facebook newsfeed. The site was redesigned in late 2008,
intended to streamline the website and make it easier to see what friends were doing.
Twitter:
Twitter is another social networking platform that allows registered users to read and write 140-
character messages called 'tweets'. It is available across all devices such as cell phones, desktops,
laptops, and tablets.
History of Twitter
Jack Dorsey, an undergraduate student at New York University, introduced the idea of an
individual using a message service to communicate with a small group. Twitter was launched as
an SMS-based communication platform. Initially it was known as "twttr". On March 21, 2006,
Jack Dorsey sent the first ever tweet: "just setting up my twttr".
➢ Grow your community by adding a follow button in your website and promote your
username.
➢ Get noticed with hash tags like #smallbiz etc.
➢ Engage with your followers by collecting feedback to build a better business.
➢ Sync your email contacts with Twitter.
➢ Keep your bio updated with the events or the business campaign you are running.
➢ Embed your best tweets and tweet to people every day.
➢ You can promote your twitter account on any printed material, e.g., business cards.
➢ Follow people who follow you.
➢ Make sure you are engaging with your customers on twitter and not to your product.
➢ Add the twitter widget to your site’s sidebar as it’s a great way to show your latest tweets
on your website.
➢ Choose from 40 different well-designed twitter buttons to quickly create a badge to
promote your account.
➢ TwitThis is a little button that can be placed in your HTML file or in your blog to allow
your readers to quickly and easily share what they are reading with their twitter
followers.
➢ Chirrup is another solution for pulling Twitter comments across any platform. It allows
you to display all the references from Twitter on a given webpage.
➢ Aweber has an excellent feature for any newsletter marketer. Newsletter delivery service
has actually created a way to convert RSS to email to tweet.
➢ Twitterfeed is a pioneer of website and Twitter integration which allows you to
automatically insert tweets into your Twitter from any RSS feed.