Social media marketing has become the buzz word at this point of time and you must have heard the experts say that it is here to stay. If you are still ignoring its importance, you are either unaware or uninterested of what social media is and what it can do your business.

The process of using social media channels for the purpose of promoting your business (whether selling a product or a service) or your website is termed as social media marketing. It is a low cost and high return promotion method who can give you numerous visitors and many fans. It gives you a good feel when you see someone returning to your website or blog again and again. This is indeed a good method to improve web traffic. Also this media does not interfere in other ways of getting web traffic; it rather complements other methods.

There are several stories of successful marketing campaigns through social media. As you cannot send photos, videos or links through Facebook, FedEx used this as an opportunity. It got an easy to use application developed for the purpose of sending photos, videos etc in a FedEx package. FedEx increased its brand awareness and hence more business.

NewBalance used an online running game on Facebook for promoting its new line of shoes. The points that you earn after playing this games were redeemed while buying a pair of NewBalance shoes. By throwing a challenge of who is the best runner, the company was actually pulling customers for buying its product.

Companies like Ford, Sony Erickson and Dell have been using Facebook, Twitter and YouTube etc. for promoting their new and old products. Such campaigns lead to increased relevant traffic and search engine ranking of the page. It helps them in increasing the brand awareness and managing the reputation of the company. All this in turn leads to increased sales of not only the product for which the campaign was launched but also other related products.

Social media marketing has its own share of limitations as well. This cannot be a good tool for small businesses being run in a small geographic area. If you need a plumber or an electrician in your own city, you will not go to Facebook or YouTube. You would type ‘Electrician in Chicago’ or ‘Plumber in Los Angles’ in Google. For promoting such businesses, you can probably use humorous videos or articles related to your business and hence attract audience to see that video or read that article. You will be able to create awareness about your business and pull customers too.

As companies like Procter and Gamble started using social networking for promoting their products, there was an obvious question in the minds of marketing fraternity- will it really work? While no one can claim the degree of success they achieved through this media, no one would deny the fact that social networking gives an effective tool of brand promotion and image building.

Today’s customer is not ready to listen even for a moment what a company has to say. They are however ready to write and read what their experience was with a particular brand. They share something they value and not what they just noticed. They are not static in what they see thus it is not easy to grab attention with a simple advertisement. They are definitely not going to give a heed to what you are saying. Hence one needs to make them listen what they want to listen.

This situation gave rise to a situation where an advertisement describing your product might not be able to sell your product on its own. Marketing fraternity needs to know what people value. People do value a brand. A brand is what they think your company or product is. Hence it is necessary to strengthen the brand image.

Earlier a brand image was in control of the company. However the changing face of marketing shows that more and more brands are looking for participative social spaces. Companies are targeting spaces in the webpages of sites like Facebook, MySpace or Twitter to create resonance regarding their own product. They are banking on eye-catching videos posted on YouTube or a game on Facebook.

The companies which are using social networking sites for brand promotion are somewhere losing control on their brands in order to grab customers’ attention. This might sound frightening to a company which is yet to plunge into using social media for marketing or brand promotion. However social media is all about sharing and not controlling. It has brought an era of brand sharing. Social networking sites have become a major crowd puller and other companies are looking at gaining spotlight at their effort.

Opinion polls and reports say that there is a group of visitors who say that they go to Facebook to get in touch with their friends and relatives and not the brands. However, there is another group of people who readily agree that they are able to get benefits from the promotional videos and ads posted on these sites. Hence there is a fairly good opportunity for all the marketers.

Video is widely used media, for purposes of entertainment, companies use it in marketing purposes, communications with the customers etc.

Here are some stats.

For example, according to information from ComScore Inc.in November 2009.  nearly 31 billion videos were viewed during the month in U.S., ( 39% were videos of Google Sites)

The most popular video site is YouTube but do not miss on other upcoming sites like Utterli, Qik etc.

Hulu is on the second place with 924 million videos viewed (3.0 percent).

Then follows Viacom Digital with 500 million (1.6 percent) and Microsoft Sites with 480 million (1.5 percent).

Videos offer many opportunities for promotion activities that social media, normally couldn’t perform and the greater area for promotion.

That’s why they need the „collaboration“ of videos and their help.

Video is becoming greater and greater part of social media system, and their marketing plans.

This tendency will inevitably continue.

First, video it’s easier to access. You don’t need to register, create a profile etc.

There is no checking, or self exposure, so it’s more suitable for the people who doesn’t like to be publicly exposed.

They can be used as an interactive tool by for example offering the video submission option on your web site and establish the video based communication with the customers.

That way customers can get  to know your company,product or services much better and get more informations about them.

By using video as an interactive tool you can, for example, demonstrate how your products or services work, and give important announcements to a much larger audience than  you can reach through social media.

So, we can give a conclusion tha t video can be great help in social media marketing campaign . This is a very large market we can reach through video.much larger than soacial medi ahas itself.

Video also has many opportunities as interactive tool which can be used in marketing strategy.

If you surf net even once in 10 days, you must be aware of the social networking sites Facebook and Twitter. If you visit internet daily even for 10 minutes, there is a high chance that you are a member of Facebook or Twitter family, or may be both.

Twitter and Facebook are two social networking sites most popular at this point of time. They have become the easiest way to connect to the people with whom you wish to stay in touch. You can communicate to them, send and receive news and ideas or form groups of likeminded people.

Twitter is a micro blogging site which is more open in approach. It is not cluttered as is MySpace and does not have strict privacy norms. Within 140 characters, you can share anything from what you wore in the New Year party to the news on terrorism and its effect on our society. You would be amazed to know that eye witnesses of several news making incidences were the ones who published the news on twitter first, then they were published by other news sites. They shared photographs and every bit of detail that they witnessed.

Twitter has changed the way we used to take news as. We are becoming more vocal about our sensitivity. We are now ready to assert something good as soon as possible and despise something bad as soon as it should be. We are not hesitant to speak in an open forum. If you want to raise funds for a noble cause, you can do that through twitter.

If you are a small business owner, you might be having clients who have a twitter account. You can send messages to them through twitter or even advertise for your company.

Unlike Twitter, Facebook is meant for sharing personal messages and photographs. Imagine, one morning you got up remembering an old incidence that occurred when you were probably in class fourth or fifth. That classmate left the school the same year and also changed the city. You might be wondering where that classmate is now and what is he doing as an adult. You can try searching him out in Facebook where millions of people are registered searching for their friends. And when you find him and exchange you photographs, you find that your naughty little friend has now lost a bit of hair yet looks smart and serious.

Facebook has changed a lot in our lives today. For people who are lonely, busy or do not socialize in person, it helps in finding friends. It can successfully convert someone asocial to a highly web-social person. There are people who have received messages on Facebook from their friends and family members in distant cities and countries at the time of crisis. The moral support that friends can give in testing time is invaluable. On the other hand you also share your precious moments with your friends and family who are geographically separated from you. If you have shared the pictures of your new born baby or your marriage, you must be knowing how it feels when you get the best wishes from people who care for you.

The history of social media started in 1950 by using the technique of Phone phreaking, or the rogue exploration of the telephone network.

Television images in motion were first sketched in 1878 after the invention of telephone.

Newspapers have the longest history.

The first printed forerunners of the newspaper in Europe appeared in Germany in the late 1400′s.

In America the first newspaper appeared in Boston in 1690,(under the title Publick Occurrence).

Since appearance of social media there is a constant battle between social and traditional media? Who is going to win?

Both sides has their advantages  and strengths but also disadvantages and weaknesses.

Let’s analyse them.

Social media are faster. But that they completely ignore old traditional marketing methods.

Traditional media have ability to report on the stories which cannot be covered by social media, they are better organized and technically equiped. People trust them more.

The weakness of traditional media is their unwillingness to change and their inflexibility.

Are the strengths ( the quickness above all) of social media enough to replace traditional media?

Not necessarily, if traditional media find a way to adapt.

It means that this conflict doesn’t have to end with the winner and defeated, but in collaboration of both sides.

Traditional and social media can find a way of collaboration and implement each other, e.g social media can use links to draw the attention to some newspaper articles in traditional media, traditional media can use positive comments about  it’s articles in blogs in marketing campaigns or close the deals through social media.

So, to answer the question from the title?

Despite appearance of social media, people still read newspapers and watch TV, they haven’ completely replaced them with social media. Therefore, we can say that social media hasn’t killed the traditional media yet.

How will the conflict end? With the victory for one of the sides or with some way of collaboration? Time will tell.

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
By Albert Einstein

Social media definitely belongs to the latter part of the above statement. How else shall we determine that our social media marketing strategy giving results?

By measuring social media parameters we can get valuable information about our customers that we didn’t have before, communicate with them and make them more familiar with our products/services, articles etc., see which contents interest them the most, what they like and dislike, gain information on new trends.  This is very important in planning our future activities and goals.

But can social media be measured and how ? What, actually, to measure?, Which techniques to use?

Let’s go from the beginning.

There’s no doubt,  social media can be measured, but there is no unique answer about the measuring strategy. It should be adjusted to concrete case and can include various measurements.

We must point out that  results of your social media campaign will not show up immediately. It takes time.

The next question is what to measure.

There are many parameters to be measured to get the complete picture on the success of our social media marketing strategy.

One of the suggestions is ROI (Return On Investment).

Then, in the case you have a blog, you can use web analytic reports  from which  you can get valuable information on the most popular content on your blog or about the visitors (how long they were on that particular page, where they came from etc.).

You can also monitor the number of visitors who are actually interacting with your content. and use Social Bookmarking,  subscribe to a RSS feed.

If you have your profile on e.g. Facebook or Twitter you can analyse the number of friends that you have, total profile visits.

Some of the parameters are overall traffic increases, where the traffic is coming from,  E-mail subscribers, amount of blog comments.

From intangible parameters, which are much more difficult to be measured, there is :number of leads, information you gain from interacting with your users, positive brand image.

Those are some of the parameters that should be measured, but the most important is to find your own strategy  depending on the goals you want to achieve with your social media marketing strategy.

It can include monitoring data, web site analytic data and manual data.

What are the tools for measurement?

Some of free tools available are: Google Alerts Social Mention ,Google Insights for Search,
Keotag, Klout, Monitter, Omgili, Quarkbase.
Pricing tools are e.g.:Trackur, PostRank Analytics

In measuring social media crucial is to find the best combination of parametres to measure and tools to apply in your  case. Only then you get  the full informations on the results of your social media marketing campaign. Metrics for any communication medium is a challenge so social media is no different.

It is crucial to understand that social media metrics need to be a combination of both tangible and intangible metrics and focusing on one over the other would not the right way to look at it.

Social media sites are becoming more and more popular each year. Don’t believe me……then read along.

The journey on social media started late 1990s and early 2000s but in the last few years, it has really caught up. Let’s check a few stats that would make it interesting. In in 2008 ( informations do not include December 2008). The most popular social media video site was Blogger (222 million), Facebook (200 million), MySpace (126 million), WordPress (114 million).

End of 2009, Facebook has more than 350 million active users, 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day, more than 35 million users update their status each day.

Popularity of Twitter is also growing.

In 2008 there were  6 million (3.8% of all adult internet users), in 2009 : 18 million (11.1%), and for the year 2010 it’s predicted that there will be 26 million (15.5%) users.

Then there is YouTube which had 13 % of increase in views of videos to year 2007.It definitely dominated the market in the number of videos and number of visitors. In November 2009, 128.1 million viewers watched more than 12 billion videos on YouTube.com (94.3 videos per viewer).

The best month for video industry was December 2008, when, according to the research done by ComScore, videos were watched by over 30milion users, clips were watched by 4 billion times.

In November 2009 -

Google Sites had 129 million unique viewers ,

Yahoo Sites were on the second place with more than 55 million viewers (8.5 videos per viewer),

Fox Interactive Media with 50 million viewers (8.9 videos per viewer)),

Viacom Digital,Microsoft Sites, Time Warner-Excl AOL, AOL LLC, Disney Online, ESPN and CBS Corporation.

From video ad networks, in November 2009,Tremor Media,.took the first place  with a potential reach of 85 million viewers,  (49.8 percent of the total viewing audience). Advertising.com Video Network was on the  second place with a potential reach of 80 million viewers (47.1 percent ), third is YuMe Video Network with 73 million viewers (43.0 percent).Other notable findings from November 2009 include:

Here are some more statistical informations from ComScore for November 2008:.

The average online video viewer watched 12.2 hours of video.

• 38.6 million viewers watched 333.4 million videos on MySpace.com (8.6 videos per viewer).
• The average Hulu viewer watched 21.1 videos, totaling 2.1 hours of videos per viewer.
• The duration of the average online video was 4.0 minutes.

So, as statistics shows ,  importance of social media and their popularity, not just for entertainment but also for business purposes, is constantly growing and this tendency will inevitably continue.

So, what are you thinking  join the bandwagon.