Is social media marketing all about facebook and twitter?

Facebook and Twitter are most flamboyantly used words in social media. People spend great amount of time & money in creating facebook pages, gathering fans and/or tweeting day and night about your niche. According to recent studies there are more than 7 million facebook users in India. So in all possibilities facebook enjoys a major chunk of the so called social media pie. However, is your online branding & social media marketing obsessed with facebook and twitter? If this is so, you’re missing niche visitors and visitors targeted for a special marketing campaign.

How is social media evolving?

Social media is basically transformative. Something that is big hit today would be side lined. Change is so rapid that you would not get a change to reword on strategies often. People today understand difference between a Google adsense advertisement and required content. Adsense which was one of the biggest platforms for marketing the product online has now got into stagnancy. If you’re interested in learning precise evolution of social media, this link has a cool article.

Is facebook/twitter enough to listen and converse with customers?

Looking at the numbers, Yes. But there are various dimensions that should be taken into consideration. People do not use facebook only to create a fan base or a company page, but also to develop interactive applications that keeps user engulfed. They either use images that attract out attention or provide interactive questionnaire. Conversation Prism provides a prism for analyzing the magnitude of conversation and listening on various social media sites.

Let the numbers talk

Following figures shows the evolution of social media

From 2007 to 2009, number of blogs increased by more than 130%.  Social networking sites grew by 196% from 2007 to 2009.

Some interesting stats:

• LinkedIn has over 50m members worldwide.
• Flickr now hosts more than 4 billion images.
• Wikipedia currently has in excess of 14m articles, meaning that it’s 85,000 contributors have written nearly a million new posts in six months.
• 15% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging, according to Technorati’s new State of the Blogosphere.
• India is currently the fastest-growing country to use LinkedIn, with around 3m total users.
• 70% of bloggers are organically talking about brands on their blog.
• 38% of bloggers post brand or product reviews.

The other side

The phrase “social media” is abused by numerous small/online companies who call themselves “Reputation Management Firm”. Sending a product messages in a bulletin board & posting product links in signatures are some of the examples of this abuse. We all know about paid tweets. People having huge follower base would tweet about your product for a few $$. Subscriber purchasing, signature purchasing and even review purchasing is on the rise. We think that everything written in social media is true and honest opinion of actual consumers. But it is not always true. Websites now offers “Featured” content section which would be a featured article or a review about company or a product. This is a good source of income for website owners and a cheap way for companies to spread their brand.

Social media is for elites?

Yes, though not 100% true, but literacy is one of the most important factors that would undermine social media marketing. This does indicates that marketing strategy has to be mix of traditional and urban style. You can quiet easily make a customer click on a facebook ad but it is equally difficult to formulate an opinion in case of rural segment or perhaps people who cannot spend more than 30 mins daily on Internet.

What else I can use?

Creating your own social network would help exponentially. You don’t need to put in $$ in creating one for your brand. NING.COM allows you to create your own social network within minutes and yes it is FREE.  Similarly, HubPages.com allows you to write an article and post it on your own page. HubPages being dedicated to marketing niche, you can build targeted fan base on here quiet quickly. And that’s not enough, HubPage is very popular site in marketing niche. Its huge network and well indexed content provides you chance to appear on Google’s 1st page the moment you write about your product. Isn’t the exciting.