VIRTUAL IS THE NEW REAL-brand building through social media

Social media marketing today has emerged as an important vertical in the arena of advertising and branding.  

But, it remains to be understood that digital marketing is as important, as tedious and as thoughtful process as the offline advertising. 

It is not merely about few Facebook posts coupled with few tweets every week!

For a social media marketing professional (SMM), social advertising is as real as ‘Real’ marketing. An advertiser will know what ground work and how much it takes to develop an advertising strategy to launch any campaign for its clients. It starts with identifying the target audience, understanding its media vehicles, which tools will work best for the specified target, segmenting the audience, putting the right content in the required media vehicles and at perfect timing. Knowing your target group and knowing where and when you will find them is the key of designing a wonderful advertising campaign. This is the trend followed in offline advertising.

Today, what remains to be assumed is that online advertising is also a pure means of advertising- it also involves same amount of thought provoking ideas and needs equal attention as far as segmentation of the target audience is concerned. Putting the appropriate content online is in the same way essential.  Not only posting on social media, but posting things online keeping in mind the timing of the target audience. Availability of your target audience is of primary importance. There’s no point in randomly posting anything, anywhere, targeting anybody. There has to be a strategic planning for it. All posts should have an appropriate meaning and reason.

To create an online presence of any particular brand, what is most important is to build up an online image and perception of the brand. Any brand has a real persona as well as an online persona.  It is a slow, steady and a well thought- upon process. It takes a great deal of working and deciding appropriate what and an appropriate how about a social campaign.

Advertising done on digital media should not be called ‘campaign’. Nobody likes being fed with a bulk of posts and promotions- that may or may not be useful for them. It should be more of an engaging and interactive activity done to promote the brands. Social media works best on the principle of dialogues and conversation- rather than one way communications.  Until and unless there’s not more of interaction- between the consumer and the seller- advertising won’t serve its purpose. Active participation of the correct audience and obtaining relevant feedback for the same, is the crucial component of social media. After all, what else does getting ‘Social’ mean?!

Lastly, it is the least job of an IT Professional, and it is not at all like managing a personal facebook profile of ours.  It would take a genuine SMM professional who understands advertising and takes this job as seriously as offline advertising.

HAVE YOU ASSIGNED THE RIGHT JOB TO A RIGHT EXPERT?