Article by John Hoff

Social media marketing is basically the act of making use of blogs, forums, and other social media tools and websites (click the ones in the picture above) to market your services or product. You don’t have to be a computer-wiz to comment on other’s articles, like this one, and leave a link to your site below your name. You also don’t have to be a computer pro in order to participate in an online forum.

Marketing Differences

There are major differences between how social media marketing and traditional marketing work and how you use them.

Traditional Marketing

In traditional marketing you typically blast your audience with some sort of sales pitch. It might be a TV commercial or an ad you placed in some entrepreneurial magazine. The problem with advertising on billboards, TV, in newspaper ads, etc., is that it’s basically a shot in the dark that anyone is going to listen to you. You try and place your ad where your audience may be (i.e. put your recipe book commercial in a slot during a cooking show on the Food Network) but how many people are really listening to your commercial?

Check out one of my favorite marketing books, Purple Cow. In it he shows you how all these forms of marketing are practically useless if you are just average. Even if you have a “very good” TV commercial that’s probably not good enough. Why? Because everyone else is very good. You’re just one in a bunch. He shows you how in order to survive in this branch of marketing (and any other) you have to be “remarkable.” Trust me, buy this book, read it, and learn from it. It’s worth the money . . . and I typically don’t advertise for others this strongly unless I feel it’s really worth it.

Looking at the picture above it becomes obvious that traditional advertising can be VERY expensive. On the other hand, looking over to the social media side of the picture you will find most of the marketing you do over there will either be free or come with a very low cost (your Internet connection and maybe the cost of your website).

Social Media Marketing

This is going to sound weird. Marketing in the social media realm is to not market at all. No this is not a paradox I’m describing. There is one huge difference you need to understand between our two diagrams above. On the traditional side you do not interact with your audience whereas on the social side you do. If you use your blog as a sales pitch or use forums to sale your website or services, you’ll lose. Readers will consider it spam. To use this media for marketing you have to keep in mind who these users are and why they are in a forum or reading a blog. Do you like spam Emails? Probably not. Well they don’t get on the computer to read a bunch of spam blogs either. Instead, they are looking for something.

Take my blog and website, for example. Do you see anywhere in this article that I’m advertising that fact that eVentureBiz hosts websites? Other than the link up at the top left, and mentioning it now for informational purposes, no. You’re probably reading this article because you want to learn something. Learn about marketing. If I were to shove hosting down your throat you’d click away from my site, probably never to return. But instead, you’re sticking around and I’m marketing to you silently. My hopes are that you read through my blog, participate in our forum, and begin to understand that “hey, this guy might know something and I want to tag along with him. Maybe this company which is not nearly as big as Yahoo! will be more helpful and interested in seeing me succeed.”

But maybe you already have a website and you’re happy with your web host. The idea is you might “spread the word” about my site and company and it only goes from there. Maybe you have a blog with 10,000 readers and you reference my site. Maybe not only you sign up to receive my blog via Email but so will others you talk to. Does this marketing strategy make sense? What you must do in the social media realm is gain your reader’s trust and be useful to them. It’s called permission marketing and it’s the best marketing you can do because the people who you are marketing to want to hear from you.

There are various forms of social media advertising. You can use a blog, comment on other’s blog, make use of community forums, create some kind of funny video on YouTube, etc. Just remember, don’t spam your services or product. It will be a waste of your time and other’s because readers will ignore you and even begin to spread the word about you (and not in a good way).

One final note. Don’t betray your social media contacts (blog readers and other users) by giving out their personal information to others. If they start receiving spam Emails because of you, you can forget gaining people’s trust.

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