Social Media Improves Reach

Like traditional marketing, Internet marketing takes time to develop and penetrate to the right people. Picking the right audience is challenging and there are many competing products and offers that can interfere with the delivery of your message. Social media provides a viral aspect to your campaign that can reach far more people than traditional or Internet marketing alone. When your product or service is introduced and cross-linked on a variety of social networks it has the potential to spread very quickly – like word-of-mouth testimonials on steroids. Internet-based marketing efforts can be tracked, often in fine detail, with analytic applications like WebTrends, Urchin, and Alexa (Grappone & Couzin, 2008). Inbound links to your content can provide a good amount of detail on your customers, their preferences, and where they are finding you. This allows for immediate adjustments to your market strategy and the opportunity to improve results.

This past week I came across an interesting article titled “The Top 7 Facebook and Twitter Strategies That are Working Right Now” (Gallagher, 2010) describing how social media is being used to find and build relationships with customers, cross-posting and cross-promoting and metrics for measuring results.

For your site, try twitter, flickr, and linkedin to cross post and promote and with automatic features. Join communities and groups to speed up the process and improve reach. Now get out there and get involved to improve your reach!

Grappone, J., & Couzin, G. (2008). Search engine optimization. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishing, Inc..