Social Media Marketing

SMM (or SMO) has been a rapidly growing form of Marketing in the past few years. Today, some online businesses don’t even bother with SEO anymore and focus all their efforts in creating a solid presence in major Social Media Networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, Myspace, etc…

If you take your online success to heart, you should know that having a solid presence in the SM sphere is a must! If you don’t have the knowledge nor the time to achieve it, our SMM team can help.

If you’re still unsure, here are some reasons why you should consider using social media:

  1. It’s natural. Not only do you get natural links without any discernible pattern, your website is exposed to large groups of people in a spontaneous fashion. This differs from paid advertising which has overt commercial overtones.
  2. It’s defensible. Once successfully mastered, social communities can be a great source of web traffic on top of any traffic you are already receiving from search engines. While you can’t easily increase your search engine traffic, social media traffic can be very easily controlled through strategic marketing.
  3. It’s low-cost/high returns. If done by yourself, costs are limited to only time and perhaps the expenses involved in hiring a freelance programmer/designer. The benefits will often exceed the cost. It would take you thousands of dollars to buy many links; social media has the ability to give you that for free.
  4. It complements other efforts. Social media optimization and marketing is usually community-specific. It doesn’t interfere with any other methods of getting traffic to your website. It can and will fit perfectly with an advertising campaign targeting other websites or search engines.

It’s All About Strategy!

As simple as it sounds to some people, serious Social Media Marketing is probably one of the toughest forms of Marketing. Sure, it’s easy to just setup an account here and there and converse with random people, but it’s certainly not as easy to engage the right individuals, in a way that they will befriend you, follow you, trust you and eventually evangelize their friends for you!

Professional SMM is a true strategy game, and depending on how you play your cards, the power of the masses can play for or against you. At IronMonk, we follow these strict steps for every new SMO project, to make sure that your initiative “goes viral” in the good way…

  1. Analyse the networks : we scan the networks and find the most appropriate ones for your niche market.
  2. Set Goals / Benchmarks: what do you want to achieve? What results do you expect from your SMO initiative?
  3. Find Groups and Communities: inside the social networks, we seek out the groups and communities where your target audience is gathering
  4. Develop and Rollout: do you have any Content to share? If not, we can help you build it. Deploying interesting and useful content is key to capture your users’ interest.
  5. Identify your Evangelists / Influencers in the community: some people will be more active than others in your fan pages, groups and blogs. Those individuals should be rewarded in order to turn them into evangelizers for your brand. This is when the true word-to-mouth starts!
  6. Offer giveaways / Develop incentives to attract more people and eventually generate more word-to-mouth. Whether it be an ebook, a t-shirt, a coupon or any kind of virtual gift, incentives are important to make people come back and talk about your brand to their friends.
  7. Engage and facilitate conversations by asking questions, launching polls, quizzes, sweepstakes.
  8. Measure results and adapt the strategy based on what worked and what didn’t.

Contact us now to see how we can help you start a solid Social Media initiative for your business.