Basic Strategy in Social Media Marketing

Image Source : http://www.flickr.com/photos/intersectionconsulting/

 In this blog post I would like to discuss about various strategies that are used behind social media. There are more things beyond this than can be achieved through social media. But in order to achieve success through social media there are some strategies that has to be kept in mind so that those are executed in a proper manner and make sure it helps in the development of the business or enterprise. Now-a-days social media has become a important element to make profit and also to create a huge goodwill in favour of the enterprise amongst the public and hence it has become an integral part of strategy more than a fashion as how it was earlier. Enterprises have started to realize the need of having  social media strategy for their business in the current situation.

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Firstly the main strategy behind social media is in Identifying the goals and objectives that are to be achieved through this. As each and everyone have their own way of marketing and different ideas about using different social media platforms it is really important for them to identify what their need exactly is. Then they must start doing more and more research which is ideal for their progress as they must decide about which social platform they are going to use and how effective will it be and will it be helpful to keep regularly engaged with the people. Then they must identify about who their target audience is and must enter the platform where they can find more people who are mainly their target audience.

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Next comes 2 main things the content and the contact which gives explanation not only about what the product exactly is, but also how different is it from others as we know if you enter any social media platform contacts start to build up naturally and obviously there will also be our competitors and hence the content we enter must be in a way to explain why ours is different from others. After this we must make sure that we develop more relationship with the people in our industry and others by having regular conversation with them through replying for their comments and for example replying for their tweets.

Slowly start checking your progress in social media by having a rough statistics in order to know whether you have stuck with the basics i.e. achieving your goals and objectives. This helps to find out where you stand and through this we can identify the flaws and make sure that it is rectified and improved. Hence analyzing, adapting and improving is also very important while undergoing a social media strategy. The following are the steps for a successful social media strategy and for more information about it please refer to the link below published by Nick Shin on July 21, 2010.

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/7-steps-for-a-successful-social-media-strategy/

To conclude with, social media needs to be bang to the point rather being very draggy in order to be successful in achieving the goals and objectives of the enterprise. It must be planned and executed in a professional manner or else we will be overwhelmed by social media. This is the main reason that most of the organisation in India has an job posting called social media expert along with them whose main job is to take care of all these strategies and makes sure that the company also has equal participation online mainly to maintain the goodwill and hold the relationship and contact with other people in the same industry. The video below gives an overview about the need of social media strategy in todays world and also about consultancies who makes business through taking care in over coming  social media strategy problems. I hope that this post has given a basic idea about what is the main strategy behind social media in todays world.

Role of Social Media in India

As we are currently in the modern and digitalised world, no one can live without internet. I would like to share some useful information, which gives us an clear idea about what is the current situation of social media in India. India has a population of over 1.17 Billion. India is also ranked second after China in terms of population. Can anyone Guess how much importance do people give for social media and how many hours do people averagely spend in the social networking internet websites perday ? Well I am sure it is a lot more than you expect. Have a look at the image below which gives you a clear picture of the question asked earlier ?

Image Source : http://www.internetmarketingjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/social-media-india-2.0011.png

This gives a clear picture and as I said earlier you can see there are 52 Million active internet users in India in the year 2009. There are 20 Million Indians who use internet everyday. They spend most of their time in social networking websites such as Orkut, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and so on. As this survey was done two years back now we can say that Orkut in India has become more outdated as facebook has more users than orkut and hence there has also talk that facebook was likely to buy orkut but still they have not given any official announced regarding that issue because, in 2009 Orkut had more users than facebook and so they did not want to be taken over by facebook. But currently in 2011 I am pretty much confident that the number of users of facebook has crossed over 10 Million in India.

As we can see a dramatic change in the increase in number of people using these social networking websites daily, the IT companies started to feel the pressure and hence decided to ban the usage of social media at work. They thought this will help the employees to concertrate more in the work that they do rather just getting diverted because of these social networking websites. To be exact, almost 96% of IT companies in India have banned the use of these social networking websites at work time. This has led to a slight fall in the number of people using social networking websites in India.

But this is not the downfall of social media in India, as social media is emerging with a new trend and different dimensions day-by-day  it attracts more people towards it. Now a days, children at the age of 5 are taught how to use computers in schools which helps them very well in exploring the world when they are growning up. These social networking websities lay as a strong platform for these children not only for their future but also to be in touch with the current world around them. Hence, these children are brought in such a way but once when they start to work, they are literally forced not to spend time in these social media websites.

When we look the other side of it, we can also see an increase in number of people using internet for educational search, general information search as well as to listen and watch music/video. I believe only this gives them a vast knowlegde and understanding rather than just books and lectures. To conclude with, I am quite sure that even though there are some drawbacks in India in using these social media it will standout itselves and improve more and will also increase as the years come by.