Social Media Marketing in Business – The Current Position

To properly consider Social Media Marketing, it is necessary to analyze where businesses large or small are positioned today and where they should be positioning themselves today to fully use the marketing tools now available.

Web Presence

Businesses large medium or small fall into one of these six categories.

• No website or web presence whatsoever
• Advertising themselves on a local website trade website or similar such as Yell.com
• With a website, of various quality designs, advertising their company, products and services.
• With a website as above but SEO (search engine optimized).
• With a website or websites customer facing which would respond to product or solution searches.
• With a network of web presences, sites and social media involvement driving targeted eTrafficLane to opt in pages, sites, products and solutions.

All but the last category are failing to optimize their web presence and consequently losing out on business.

What has changed

Traditional Marketing has been traditionally employed at two basic levels.

• Promoting or advertising the brand.
• Promoting or advertising the Product or Service.

Promotion or advertising has used all the media available from time to time i,e, Newspaper, Bill boards, Leaflets, Yellow Pages, Direct Mail, TV, Radio and of late, internet advertising – Google AdWords, AdSense, Advertising sites, Banner advertising, Facebook Ads, etc. Of the latter group only Facebook ads allow targeted advertising and the other methods all suffer from lack of targeting.

What much of business, mainly through ignorance and sometimes intellectual resistance, have missed is that the use of almost any social media would allow them to filter the general public into interest groups where more effective targeted marketing can take place.In addition the Social Media market place operates in real time and it is possible to respond immediately to the market and easily conduct research and obtain immediate feedback.