Web 2.0 the millionth word in the dictionary is hot buzz in the era of internet. Digital marketers have rejoiced the transformation in marketing era. Social Medias have become potential source for a company to network, obtain leads and target audiences of different lifestyle, age groups, country through social networking websites. To name a few; Bebo, Viadeo, Xing, LinkedIn, Facebook, Orkut, Twitter, Newsvine, Digg all serves different purposes. The purpose of networking sites was to collaborate, interact and communicate with colleagues, friends or people with similar interest around the world.



But now, Modern marketing experts have found the potential traffic just through the Social Medias; the traffic generated here was not through the marketing campaigns. It was the power of word of mouth generated through social media interaction among people. There are many networking tools available online but only few interesting models among them have succeeded. The tools with unique networking model in buzz are; LinkedIn, Facebook and twitter. LinkedIn is known for its professionalism, twitter for viral marketing and facebook for its fun factor.

Looking into LinkedIn from Marketing Perspective:

LinkedIn: I’ve been using LinkedIn since long time, it is a social networking site for business which allows individual to setup professional profiles. Once a person joins LinkedIn he/she can join the various connections with others and develop a network of professional contacts. LinkedIn is known for professional networking. It is important to develop network on LinkedIn to gain businesses.

Profile: update your profile by asking various questions. The questions in profile include your education, professional and little bit of personal background. If you are planning to sell yourself to other company you need to have really interesting profile on LinkedIn as LinkedIn is also known as powerful hub to hire employees. For marketers it is essential to understand its value as a completed profile increases their brand on LinkedIn.

Join Group: there are various groups related to your services/ business. You can be a member of these open groups and interact with people with similar interests by raising discussion topics or participating in pre-existing discussions. These groups will help you to grow your professional networks and gain identity by answering questions of people. If you are chose by the questioner for the best answer you are flagged as ‘best answer giver’ which improves your brand. LinkedIn is the only networking tool which help you market yourself as proficient as possible.

Blog on groups: If you are maintaining a blog or a zone in article hub you can provide the links of your articles to the news section of these groups. If you have an interesting marketing offer on your website even that can be added in the discussion or news section of the blog with a catchy subject line. Remember, these updates reach to people through mails helping you in directly approaching people of similar interests without any need of database –thus being cost effective.


LinkedIn Q & A: Explore the new Answers section. Find the category that is most specific to your business and review the questions there. Can you contribute answers to these questions and establish yourselves as an authority within their Q&A area? By answering questions you can receive more exposure by interacting with others, and the Q&A responses you provide become part of your profile which helps enhance your presence when people view it. This zone can be answered by people in your network and also people of similar interests around the globe. If you keep giving interesting answers on regular basis you would regularly obtain the best answer status. This will help you obtain status of EXPERT in the regularly answered field by LinkedIn. This status will help you reach/ gain an identity from LinkedIn population.

Example of a question; Can you please tell me what is social media marketing and how can it help my business obtaining sales leads?

This question was answered by various people around the globe, the best answer was chose by the questioner and also the interesting feedback made the answerer obtain a social media marketing project.

Interact with people in network: To interact with people in your network you can update your status message, add a slideshare application, raise a poll question, ask questions in LinkedIn Q & A section or add the Amazon book widget – showcasing the books you are reading at present.

Recommendation: Receive recommendations from others for the services you provide and you can be listed within their services directory. This will help you gain high profile. Moreover, this contributes to the entire network’s effectiveness. Everyone benefits: the person giving the recommendation, the person receiving the recommendation and the person looking for someone in that recommended person’s field.


Twitter

Twitter is a thought search engine where you connect with a person’s thought rather to their website as in Google. Twitter was started as SMS service restricting your message to 140 characters. These 140 characters have turned out to be the marketing tool doing exceptionally well in the virtual world. Twitter works on the ideology following interesting, like-minded people and obtain their thoughts or messages directly to your twitter homepage.

Most commonly asked question - How to find like minded people on twitter??

1. It is just so simple; you need to go to search.twitter.com, put in the relevant keywords and checkout what have people tweeted using the keywords you entered.

2.For ex; if you are looking to connect with people interested in social media marketing

3. Just go type social media marketing on twitter.com search column,You’ll find tweets with those keywords

4. If you find it fascinating, you can click and check the person’s profile and follow them.

5. If you are not happy with the tweet or have any questions related to it you can directly add @tweeter’s name and response in the message column, this directly goes to the tweeter’s inbox.

6. If you have liked the tweet you can RT (Re-tweet) the same from your profile by adding RT@tweeter’s name and copy paste the tweet made by the tweeter.

7. Hashtag (#topic) tweets to create a custom results page. There are few popular words related to few services.

8. For example; #socialmedia #swinefluindia #twitter #facebook etc. people while tweeting use these links as keywords. On clicking these links by viewers, twitter leads to a page where it showcases results.

Twitter From Marketing Perspective:

For modern marketers, this tool has turned out to be a boon in targeting people of their interest. An analyst report says there has been 1382% growth in users from January to February 2009 with 3,000,000 average number of Tweets per day on Twitter.com. How can it help you in marketing check it out:


Identify Target: For marketer, twitter can be used to identify people interested in services / products the company offers. They can identify people from any part of the world, interact with them through @_______- and drive a lead to their business.

Wipro maintains five profiles on twitter @wipro @wiprocareers @infocrossing @flaunturego @wiprosfdc and all the profiles serves different purpose with unique set of followers.

Market Research: Twitter can also be used for market research purpose. My team at CMO Axis recently designed website for ‘The Chief Marketing Officer of Wipro – Global IT Solutions provider and frugal marketing expert’, Jessie Paul (@Jessie_Paul). The website designed is for her new book ‘No Money Marketing’ going to be launched in month of September www.nomoneymarketing.org . Jessie Paul tweeted about her website with a review request and she was surprised by wonderful responses – few fascinating feedbacks to the website were integrated.

Ask Questions: Similarly, when a new product is launched you can check with people asking for them to review. Thus, reducing the cost of your focus group interviews. Many popular brands checks feedback about their services/ products using the search.twitter.com results.

Improve Customer Service: Twitter can help improvising customer service; I was not satisfied with Airtel’s Broadband service. I went to the ‘find people’ section of twitter and typed the word AIRTEL to search the profile. As soon as I found 5 profiles related to Airtel, I tweeted “@profile1 @profile2 @profile3 @profile4 @ profile 5 your broadband sucks big time and I am annoyed with your prolonged customer service waits”. I was responded immediately with strong action. Similarly, Comcast is turning around their negative reputation by displaying genuine interest in customer issues posted on Twitter.

Augment Sales: Twitter can help boosting company’s sales ex: Dell earned $1 million through Twitter during last year. Dell sends messages to its Twitter subscribers about special private sales.

Build Brand: Use Twitter to host contest and create buzz; I recently won a T-shirt from Wipro’s @flaunturego profile, which is trying to build the brand of its latest trendy laptop ‘myego’. All I did to win a T-shirt is flaunted my ego in for of a tweet with the link #myego. Seeing my tweet many followers of mine started tweeting about #myego, thus spreading word of mouth and creating awareness. This contest just do not create buzz among followers but have tendency to augment the follower’s list virally.

Facebook

Facebook the fun part of virtual world is effective way to target different audiences via interaction through entertaining way. To know more about how facebook can help you in marketing checkout the article written by me- Facebook Branding Tips Share