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Online Social Network Marketing

While most social networking sites are offered free of charge, creating and maintaining your online presence at sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter can be confusing and time consuming. To make the most of your time, it’s important to understand the tools available to you, the benefits of the different networks, and to plan your strategy accordingly.

What are the benefits of online social network marketing?

• Target Your Audience
• Communicate with Customers
• Promote Brand loyalty
• Publicize Promotional Events
• Increase Brand Visibility
• Drive Website Traffic
• Gauge Customer Interest

How can Blue Water Media help?

• Select Relevant Social Networks
• Setup Profiles Quickly and Professionally
• Integrate your social presence with your existing marketing
• Recommend effective strategies and techniques

The following will explain in more detail the different ways social networks and Blue Water Media can help you best market your company to the online world.

What are the benefits of online social network marketing ?

In today’s fast paced and technology-driven world, it has become vital from a marketing standpoint to expand your firm’s web presence to its maximum capacity. This often involves broadening your marketing efforts to the social networking domain. Doing so can help you learn about your target audience, develop closer relationships with customers, create brand loyalty and involvement, publicize promotional events, increase brand visibility, drive consumers to your website, and promote new products and services.

• Target Your Audience - When you join a social networking site you will gain access to your customers’ profiles, which contain valuable information about their wants and needs as consumers. Many networks will allow you to target specific demographics.
• Communicate with Customers - At the heart of every social networking website is communication. Unlike traditional forms of marketing that are ‘one way’ communications, social networking will enable your brand to develop a ‘two way’ communication with your customers. This ‘two way’ communication will give you greater insight to customer
• Promote Brand Loyalty - By creating a group for your company on a social networking site you allow members of your group to view your promotional photos and gain information about your company. Your business name will also show up in the Groups section of the user’s profile. The more exposure and interaction they have with your company, the more attached they will become to your brand.
• Publicize Promotional Events - By utilizing the events feature on many social networking sites you can create, publicize, and invite contacts to promotional events. When people RSVP to a Facebook event, for example, their attendance will be published in the news feed that all of their friends will see.
• Increase Brand Visibility - Sometimes the difference between winning and losing is simply showing up. Creating and maintaining active social network profiles increases the chances that a potential customer discovers your brand. Creating a profile for your company on various social networking sites is a great way to build your internet presence and expose more people to your brand. Some of the sites we recommend enable contacts to become fans of your company causing your company’s name and logo to appear on their profile. Then anyone who looks at their profile will see your logo.
• Drive Website Traffic - While communication is at the heart of all social networking, it is this communication that offers you the opportunity to entice customers to visit your website. By posting links, offering incentives, and generally creating topics of interest, you can drive more customers to your website - and take them one step closer to making a purchase.
• Gauge Customer Interest - Because the customers you interact with on social networking sites are often your most loyal and engaged customers, they tend to be happy to offer their advice. This willingness to help provides the opportunity to conduct informal research of customer interest on new products and services. You’ll gain insights that improve your products while making your customers feel valued and appreciative of your candid communication.

How Can Blue Water Media Help ?

Blue Water Media assist you in selecting the social networking websites that are most relevant to your business and target audience. Blue Water Media will then create your profiles on the selected sites taking care to maintain your established brand identity. Once your profiles have been formed, Blue Water Media will advise your staff on how to manage the profiles and recommend strategies and techniques for merging your existing marketing.

• Select Relevant Social Networks - When embarking on an internet marketing campaign it is important to clarify who you are trying to reach. Depending on your target market, we can use our internet prowess and knowledge of social networking sites to recommend those that will best access the consumers your company wants to reach.
• Setup Profiles Quickly and Professionally - Our skilled web and marketing staff will set up profiles that are professional in appearance and correspond with your brand identity.
• Integrate with Existing Marketing - Blue Water Media will provide you with methods for incorporating your new social networking profiles into your existing marketing initiatives.
• Recommend Effective Strategies and Techniques - Using our in depth understanding of online social networks and internet marketing in general, we can put together a plan that best utilizes the tools these sites offer to help your company reach its goals. We will assist you in managing these news channels for marketing and communicating with your customers.

Primary Social Networks

There are many social networks from which to choose. There are a small handful that have the largest audience and we therefore commonly recommend these primary social networks to all clients.

Facebook is currently the number one social networking site on the web. It has transformed from a social networking tool for college students to a free access website that allows users to join a network (city, region, workplace, or school) and create a profile for themselves. Once a profile is created, users can connect with friends, send private messages, create affinity groups based on common interests, write on their own and other users’ public “walls” or message boards, become fans of a particular product or brand, upload photos and videos, write public notes, and promote and invite other Facebook users to events. All activities can be published on a public “News Feed” visible to all a user’s Facebook “Friends.”
Demographics/Points to Consider: Facebook can help you reach a broad range of target markets. Facebook is used internationally by people of all ages, ethnicities, interests and walks of life. Numerous Facebook features leave no shortage of ways to creatively market your business.

LinkedIn is a social networking website that focuses on the business world. As of May 2009, it had more than 40 million registered users, working in 170 industries. Users can create a profile in which they give their relevant personal and work-related information. They then link to current and former colleagues and friends and these people are listed on a user’s profile as “Connections”. They can also engage with the larger LinkedIn community by asking and responding to questions using the LinkedIn Answer feature. Individual companies also have profiles on LinkedIn.
Demographics/ Points to Consider: As the premier online networking tool in the Business world, LinkedIn is a great way to reach young to middle-aged professionals both in the US and abroad.

MySpace is a social networking website with an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, message sending groups, photos, music, posts, videos, and event notifications for teenagers and adults internationally. MySpace has over 260 million users worldwide.
Demographics/Points to Consider:Though quite similar to Facebook in size and features, MySpace has traditionally appealed to a slightly younger, more artistic, music-oriented, and liberal demographic than Facebook, though with the expansion of Facebook in recent years this distinction is slowly disappearing.

Twitter has recently emerged as a social networking and micro-blogging site with a vast following. A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranked Twitter as the third most used social network, which puts the number of unique monthly visitors at roughly 6 million and the number of monthly visits at 55 million. Twitter enables its users to post ‘tweets’ or text blurbs of up to 140 characters and comment on other user’s tweets. Joining and using Twitter is free and tweets can be open to public viewing or their visibility can be limited to selected contacts.
Demographics/Points to Consider: Twitter’s primary demographic is higher educated young to middle aged professionals.

YouTube is currently the most visited video sharing and viewing website globally. YouTube allows people to easily upload and share video clips on the YouTube site and across the Internet through mobile devices, websites, email, and blogs. Everyone can watch videos freely on YouTube on topics ranging from from current events to the latest music to wacky and often bizarre home videos.
Demographics/Points to Consider: YouTube is popular around the world and accessed to some extent by people of all ages. It has traditionally been more commonly used by teens and young adults, however.