Increasing Profits Through Social Media
While the social media tools available to businesses can be overwhelming, organizations are rarely interested in social media unless they can find proven ways to increase profits. The ways to monetize social media are increasing as quickly as social media features themselves.
Marketing through social channels has become differentiated into unique advertisement and sales propositions. When it comes to traditional marketing, businesses can choose to offer special ordering possibilities or promotions only available to fans or followers on social media sites.
For more modern marketing techniques, companies can use viral and conversational marketing. While “viral” can be overused, the concept of creating natural interest among consumers and generating momentum can still help businesses succeed.
Small companies especially can save costs by leveraging social media so that fans share brands on their own without the need for expensive advertising. Conversational marketing is a similar concept but requires the business to actively engage customers instead of simply directing messages to them-a key change the social media revolution has implemented.
Other marketing offshoots can also help social media become profitable, such as mobile marketing through phone services and the fast-growing geo-marketing, which ties in location with status updates to draw participants to particular locations. Something as paradigm shifting as social media also infiltrates other parts of business and provides additional ways to save or make Income.
Many startup companies have the ability to make Income by selling virtual goods online through social media interaction. Other businesses can create and sell widgets or other useful applications for managing social networks.
Many companies can successfully recruit employees through social media interaction, which can reveal applicants with the most genuine interest in the company. Key to the monetization of social media is the social object.
A social object is an image, post, video, message, or other basic concept that companies choose to distribute online. Companies attempt to spread social objects as far as possible through appropriate use of social media optimization (SMO), or aligning keywords and tags with the object to help associate the content with the right ideas so that search engines will pick up and display it as often as possible to the right users.
Good SMO uses several different object components to increase distribution. Companies create strong titles for the object that sum up its content while also creating interest, along with more detailed descriptions that combine traditional advertising enticement with an introduction to the object, usually aimed at a particular audience.
Additional tag keywords can also help connect the object to the right searches. SMO is not strictly concerned with wording alone. The timing and placement of the social object can be equally important.
A business that distributes an object in the midst of strong buzz about a completely separate topic may not generate any interest. Even small choices can have large consequences-an object published on a Friday afternoon may have a completely different (and unimpressive) result compared to the same object published on a Monday morning.
Companies must also use the right objects to appeal to the right customers, an area where traditional demographic studies can still serve a vital purpose. Amidst planning on how to make Income, deciding on which social objects will accomplish that goal, and figuring out how to distribute those objects, businesses will eventually run into choices concerning auto posts and syndication.
Businesses should try to publish objects to as many platforms as possible. Unfortunately, there are a growing number of platforms and they are becoming increasingly integrated, which can prove dangerous for a company.
A business anxious to start a viral campaign may publish an object onto Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and its own lifestream at the same time, but many viewers will have applications that post Twitter updates on Facebook and push Tumblr updates to Twitter, or vice-versa. Others will have a single application that shows updates from all three and many more networks.
Automatically feeding a new object to all these channels will create an immediate overload, where viewers will see a dozen different updates in a row, all on the same publication of the same object. Rather than deal with these annoying repeats, most users will simply block the business posts entirely. Organizations must be sure to only publish to particular networks and then let those networks handle distribution on their own.
