"Engage, Invest, Interact!" - Tips For Social Media Marketing

Budding entrepreneurs and season business veterans alike have realized that a very important road to building brand success is to bring their product to the people – today, this means bringing their product to the social networks. Social media has become a buzzword recently as old companies scramble to find the best marketing strategy that harnesses the power of social media, while start-ups and new projects can hardly be birthed without a thoughtful and creative media team.

How to use it?

But what does it take to really utilize this powerful new tool? It’s not as simple as just creating a Facebook fan-page. The key to social media is to build a brand based on a theme, and provide people the opportunity to interact with that theme through the various social media platforms.

What this entails is a well prepared marketing strategy that first involves introspectively identifying what an organization wants out of social media, and what that organization’s theme is going to be. If a company wants to build it’s brand as the hottest new club in town, then it needs to understand what that image looks like to the customers who will frequent their location. Understanding the theme of being a hot new club will enable more precise market research into successful clubs and will give the company a much stronger idea of the mannerisms it must incorporate to be successful on social media.

The owners would have to create a Facebook page and begin using strategies that condition their customers to use the social media they offer. In the club example, this could mean having an attractive young lady holding an iPad standing next to the door man and having people sign into Facebook to “Like” the Facebook page. It can mean having the bartender announce that for the next half-hour there will be an Instagram competition or a “tweet-a-clever-quote” competition with the winner getting a free drink. It can mean using Roqbot to allow people in the club to DJ the music, or having folks tweet in their song requests.

Engagement & interaction

The idea behind a successful social media strategy is “engagement through investment, investment through interaction”. A product or company must have people engaged with their social media interface and they get them to engage by having people invest their time. The only reason people will invest their time is if there is an element of interaction between them and the product. Knowing this, any successful media strategy will involve a very precise and thorough development of the company’s idea of itself and what it is offering, a well executed development plan that builds the media platforms to represent that idea, and a dedicated team that is able to keep up with the constantly changing nature of social media. This approach to creative design is what is now a necessary step for the success of any organization in today’s age of social media.

Author Bio:
Kate Simmons is a freelance writer and blogger. She likes to write about topics related to business, especially management and marketing.