Page 84 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

» Determine the metrics that you will use.
It’s important to understand the real value of metrics when it comes to
SMM. You’re not going to be able to wrap up your numbers with a bow and
present them to your manager. For this reason, it’s good to choose a simple
metric, such as the number of retweets on Twitter or Likes on Facebook to
start. This is not an exact science. You want to alert people to your message.

Treating SMM Differently

from Brand Marketing

Because of the power of peer influence, social media marketing is increasingly
approached differently from brand and direct-response marketing. The differ-
ences stem from the fact that the philosophical approaches, strategies, and exe-
cution tactics of SMM are more community and socially oriented.

Social media marketing is fundamentally about engaging with expert, referent, and
positional influencers and strategically leveraging social media in all its forms to
meet marketing and business objectives. As a result, you need to understand how
social media marketing fits into the context of brand and direct response marketing.

SMM in the context of brand marketing

Brand marketing focuses on building equity around a brand, its personality, and
attributes. Customers purchase products based on the brand promise. Through
various forms of advertising and communications, the brand promise is brought
alive to generate awareness, build excitement, and get specific products included
in a consideration set. Mass media channels are typically used to build awareness
for the brand, reposition it with more powerful attributes, or ultimately sell prod-
ucts. This will always be central to marketing efforts. All brands require signifi-
cant effort to penetrate a market and generate desire.

SMM complements brand marketing in some key ways:

» SMM places extra emphasis on peer-to-peer marketing and allows for
peer-to-peer decision-making in a digital context.
The focus is on understanding how consumers are interacting with each other
on social platforms versus how they’re interacting with the brand. Consumers
are asked to do the marketing for the brand by layering their own voices and
perspectives on top. The result is the socialization of a message or story in a
way that’s meaningful and relevant to their world.

68 PART 1 Getting Started with Social Media Marketing