Thursday, March 11, 2010

Are You Investing in a SMM Campaign?


Written by Ann Liu  

For many busi­ness own­ers and career pro­fes­sion­als, I know you’ve already begun inte­grat­ing social media mar­ket­ing into your mix. But for a LOT of oth­ers — there’s been a hold, or a tip-toe approach.

Cur­rently, there are 581 Mil­lion cus­tomers using social media – a num­ber that’s grow­ing every day. How will your busi­ness reach them before your com­peti­tors do? Are you start­ing to invest in a social media mar­ket­ing cam­paign? Or you are still feel panic and frus­trate to get into that.

Recently Inside Face­book reported that the US gain of more than 4.5 mil­lion monthly active Face­book users, it was the high­est num­ber of any coun­try. Because of the large installed base of US Face­book users, it rep­re­sented a 5% gain, com­pared with 10% growth in coun­tries such as Indone­sia, the Philip­pines and Malaysia.

The emar­keter has also con­ducted a study that toward to the top 10 coun­tries, which ranked by gain face­book users from Dec 2009 to Jan 2010, and Face­book audi­ence growth in the past 30 days.


From above fig­ure you can see, for its size, India added rel­a­tively few new users in Decem­ber 2009. Its high 9% growth rate was from a very small base, and Face­book still reaches only 0.5% of the pop­u­la­tion of the coun­try (Unfor­tu­nately, Thai­land is not in the list). In regard­ing to the user’s rate of growth, the largest gain came from males ages 18 to 25, fol­lowed by women 26 to 34. Despite the already-large base of users under 35, those groups also posted the high­est rates of growth.

On the other hand, for the gov­ern­ment orga­ni­za­tion, Human Cap­i­tal Insti­tute and Saba recently did a study toward looked at the effec­tive­ness of social net­work­ing in con­duct­ing gov­ern­ment work, how agency type affects the use, the per­cep­tion of social net­work­ing, and the future expec­ta­tions and bar­ri­ers for its use.

Accord­ing to the study, Human Cap­i­tal Insti­tute find that 66% of all gov­ern­ment agen­cies cur­rently use some form of social net­work­ing – from blogs and wikis to instant mes­sag­ing and dis­cus­sion boards. 31% of those sur­veyed have embraced social media as a means of pro­vid­ing a more effi­cient cus­tomer feed­back channel.

“Real-time col­lab­o­ra­tion and social net­work­ing tech­nolo­gies are rapidly migrat­ing from con­sumers to both enter­prises and gov­ern­ment agen­cies,” said Saba Chair­man and CEO Bobby Yazdani.

Come back to your orga­ni­za­tion social media mar­ket­ing cam­paign, before you imple­ment or invest­ing in any type of online mar­ket­ing or social net­work­ing solu­tion, my advice for you in 2010 would be that — take the time to fully under­stand your tar­geted audi­ence first. Try to deter­mine what your online goals and objec­tives are, and make sure that your solu­tion includes the most effec­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion option(s) for your tar­get market.

Most impor­tantly, do not spend valu­able time imple­ment­ing an online cam­paign just because every­one else is talk­ing about it. Once you’ve deter­mined what your audi­ence is inter­ested in, take time to research the most appro­pri­ate strat­egy or net­work that suit your busi­ness needs. It will save you much time and money over the long run.

Social media mar­ket­ing is a new effi­cient way that will help you drive traf­fic, gen­er­ate the leads & sales, which you hadn’t thought of before. If you do in-house, try to use exper­i­ment with a hypoth­e­sis and mea­sure the results method. You’ll see those lit­tle bets can go a long way to refine your mar­ket­ing efforts — test­ing them and shar­ing the results will get your management’s atten­tion and will­ing­ness to exper­i­ment more and try big­ger efforts.

Good luck and have a fab 2010!

About the Author

Ann LiuAnn Liu is a certified professional Internet marketer, passionate blogger, author, infopreneur, web and social marketing consultant. Signup for her newsletter or RSS feed to receive her latest news, tips and articles at http://MarketingbyAnn.net. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook too.

Free Con­tent for Your Web Site! If you enjoy this above article and want to use it on your own website, you are welcome to use it, ONLY if the Author's Resource Boxes is included. Thanks for visiting!


    Related Posts

    Click here to get Virtual Agent Pro

    Speak Your Mind

    Tell us what you're thinking...
    and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!

    Spam protection by WP Captcha-Free