“How can you squander even one more day not taking advantage of the greatest shifts of our generation? How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?.” – Seth Godin
We are at a point of time where technology has completely changed the way we communicate.
Social Media is not ‘just another fad’. In fact, it is an integral part of millions of lives today.
The number of sign-ups and visits on these networks seems to be increasing everyday.
This means that more people getting connected online today than there were yesterday, and the number will only increase. Even people who were not using internet actively seem to be bitten by the Social Networking bug.
What does all this mean to people like you who are trying to reach customers?
This means opportunity! It has become very easy to reach out to your potential customers. The process of setting up accounts on these sites is so simple, it hardly takes few minutes to register. It is very easy to share information about your business or brand or cause. The best part is that all this can be done with almost zero monetary investment ! Reaching targeted people has never been this cheap and easy!
But there has to be a catch right? Yes, unfortunately, there is. You have to remember that it is easy for *anyone* to do all this. This has led to a huge surge in spam and irrelevant stream of information. There is way too much chaos. And your message can easily get lost.
How do i get noticed on social media ?
This is not an easy task anymore, owing to the sheer number of people sharing and publishing information online. Every day billions of photos, status updates, videos etc are being shared by millions of people. There is way too much information(useful and otherwise) floating around the web.
To worsen the matters, the average attention span of people in general has reduced so much, that you would be lucky if you can hold their attention for a few moments. So how would someone get noticed in all this chaos ? How can you get the attention of your potential customers ?
Say hello to Social Media Marketing. One of the newest kids on the marketing block.
Social Media Marketing, what ?
Social Media Marketing is one of the latest buzzwords in the online marketing industry. It is the term used to represent the set of activities that one does to reach out to potential customers on Social Networking sites. Lot of businesses (of all shapes and sizes) use social media to interact with their costumers and engage them in some way or other. If done right, social media marketing can actually help you increase sales (See this article on Bloomberg about Dell’s increase in sales).