What is the purpose of social media in marketing?

What is the purpose of social media in marketing? This is a question that is seldom asked and never discussed with any clarity.

Social media marketing does not generate direct sales, it drives customers and interested parties to your web site where all online business should be conducted.

Brand awareness is only part of the issue, and social is social not business. Social media is used by the public to get personal and social with their various groups of friends. Us as marketers are intruders in this space and should remember this at all times.

The many social media platforms are a source of prospects and a place to create brand awareness, not sales. Social media platforms have been hijacked by marketers and it does not take the public long to realise this and ignore your company page once the social edge wears thin and the marketing edge starts to shine through.




Being on the social media pages that your potential customers use is all about brand awareness and implementing the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) strategies which your marketing team should have in place that ensure your customers use the correct key words and key word phrases when searching for your services, products or events in all the major search engines.

It thus follows that you may have many thousands of likes, followers, G+'s  and other social signals, but little direct business from your social media pages. So once you understand clearly that the purpose of social media pages within the online marketing arena is to create brand awareness and SEO points for your company pages which funnel interested and focused buyers to your company site, then you will be alright, and get the results from the organic search results in search engines like BING,  YAHOO and GOOGLE with your targeted key words and keyword phrases showing up at the TOP of SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages)

Read this interesting article "How has Social media changed our marketing landscape"

Social media and advertising stuff from big brother

If you dont know who "BIG BROTHER" is then you are wasting your time reading this post.

BIG BROTHER  watches your every keystroke and follows each click of your mouse, when ever you give him and his many allies the opportunity. This is scary stuff for those who wish to hide or those that have privacy concerns.

I just read this post http://www.zdnet.com/quarantining-facebook-to-control-tracking-7000000228/  which reminded me of these very disturbing issues. But the big marketing firms are the main culprits, and not the governement (well not yet anyway)

Targeted advertising is getting better and better for those that have the resources to tap into the rich data mines that have evolved along with the social media growth. They know your every move, who your online friends are,  which chat rooms you visit, what you purchase online, who you purchased it from, how many searches you made about the product you purchased before you spent your hard earned cash, how many times you visited each online store, and what other items you looked at whilst browsing. SCARY STUFF but very true.

Each website you visit leaves a cookie on you computer, or the computer that you were using. when you login to a site from a different computer the site notes this and leaves an indicator within the cookie that you use different computers, so that the owners know that they need to treat your data slightly different to that fella who uses one access point only.

for those that do serious SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) these data mines are an interesting pool of information about how the end user interacts with your pages, and what tools to use to ensure your SEO  is treated as you would like it to be by the search engines and their marketing friends who are associated with BIG BROTHER.

Remember that you "SMART PHONE" is a computer too, and also keeps cookies in its memory bank. these cookies are vitally important for your security at any site, and deleting them places you in danger of having your info attacked by hackers. so be aware of what these cookies do before you just delete them from you computer. But getting your browser to remove them is also a security risk. What to do? 

Only do online banking from your own devices, never use a shared computer for any financial transactions of any nature. It is very risky to do so!!

always log out / off from any site that requires a pass word to enter

never allow your device to remember your pass word, if others get access they have access to all your remembered passwords.

When using Faceook, Twitter, Linkedin or other social media  you are bombarded with ADVERTISING FROM all sides and many different angles. take time and notice what these adds are for and be surprised at how accurate the marketing companies are getting with their offers.