Page 24 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

In those days, few people bought online, and the ones who did were on the fringes
of mainstream society.

Those days are over now. With over 300 million people using the web on a regular
basis in the United States alone and approximately 3.2 billion users globally,
using the Internet has become a mainstream social activity. Consumers approach
purchasing online differently, too, and as a result, you need to approach your
marketing online differently as well. Your approach must incorporate influence
and the different roles that people play in the realm of social media, especially
because social media itself has changed over the last decade with the rise of
smartphones.

This chapter discusses the fundamentals of social media marketing: what it is,
how it works, who the players are, and what it means in the context of your other
marketing efforts.

Defining Social Media Marketing

A discussion of any subject needs to begin with a definition, and so here’s the
one for social media marketing: Social media marketing (SMM) is a technique
that employs social media (content created by everyday people using highly
accessible and scalable technologies such as social networks, blogs, micro-
blogs, message boards, podcasts, social bookmarks, communities, wikis, and
vlogs).

Social media (which has probably been one of the most hyped buzzwords of the
last decade) refers to content created and consumed by regular people for each
other. It includes the comments a person adds at the end of an article on a website,
the family photographs she uploads to a photo-sharing service, the conversations
she has with friends in a social network, and the blog posts she publishes or com-
ments on. That’s all social media, and it’s making everyone in the world a content
publisher and arbitrator of content. It’s democratizing the web. Facebook, shown
in Figure 1-1, is the most popular social network. It allows you to connect with
friends and share information in a matter of minutes. Facebook has 2.41 billion
monthly active users around the world.

8 PART 1 Getting Started with Social Media Marketing