Social Media Marketing

The news is full of stories about how social media networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are changing our lives, and undeniably they have begun to exert a huge influence on the way companies market themselves. According to studies, Social Media Marketing accounts for 5.6% of overall marketing budgets - this is set to rise steeply to nearly 20% over the next five years.

As with all well-hyped new markets, however, there is a danger of over-excitement. Many businesses believe that participation in social media is a magic bullet which will solve all their problems. Others feel they should "get a Twitter" just because everyone else has one. Both approaches are profoundly wrong.

Increasingly, ordinary people are using their online social networks to find suppliers (offline ones have always been popular). Someone looking for, say, a hairdresser will typically post the query on Facebook or Twitter and wait for his or her friends to come up with recommendations. Someone booking a holiday - or even a table at a restaurant - will search content on YouTube and Flickr (among others) to investigate and get a flavour of each of their potential choices.

If your restaurant, holiday resort, hair salon or whatever has pre-empted this with an engaging presence and attractive content on those networks you stand to beat your competition to those customers.

For even tighter integration, APIs like Facebook Connect allow (among other things) your website to talk to Facebook's authentication system, meaning your visitors can bring their Facebook personas with them to your site and anything they do on your site will be posted to their Facebook walls. This, in turn, means more traffic for your site.    

The key to success is to approach social media marketing as a conversation (a dialectic) between your organisation and the outside world, unlike traditional advertising which is more of a one-way lecture (the didactic approach).

Here at Ugli, we can help you answer questions like:

• Will my business benefit from Social Media Marketing?
• Would my website benefit from integration with such services as Facebook Connect?
• How can I engage my customers and potential customers in an intelligent dialogue from which all parties benefit?
• Which social networks should I use to do this, and how should I use them?