Develop a social networking strategy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Develop a social networking strategy - Essay Example Social media marketing is the promotional activity through which the business targets the prospect or potential customers via various social media sites in order, to increase the sales, enhance the brand loyalty and accomplish the business goals. It is very different from the traditional marketing, where promotion is highly dependent on the high-traffic Media, such as print and television. Unlike traditional means marketing through social media sites does not requires any paid placement that are charged to the business, but requires the marketer to devise methods in which information can be presented, so that the target audiences can assign value to the offerings. A social media marketing plan can take various forms like creating page of Facebook, developing a blog that focuses on issues related to the business segment in which the organization is dealing, new tools like Foursquare and reward on returning to visit the store through virtual badges (Powell, Groves & Dimos, 2011). This study focuses on the social media as a marketing tool for Book Bunker. Figure 1 Source: (Roberts, 2002) Figure 2 Source: (Roberts, 2002) Social Media Social media includes online tools that allow people with similar interest to share information and learn from each other or network over an open process. The information that is found on these sites are referred to as user generated content, which signifies that any individual can post their comments or suggestion on these sites with almost no or minimal restriction. This type of user-supplied content can vary over a wide range starting from bookmarked links to written posts, photos, original music and videos. It can be unstructured as well, such as family photos on Facebook or in a very formal and detailed structure such as article on Wikipedia. A partial list of structures that are available for a social media site includes combination of blogs, forums, micro-blogs, video-sharing, photo-sharing, customer reviews, online publishing, social and professional networking, or any other traditional website that accepts post from online communities. The media has become a significant element in driving the page visits and views and some sort of social media feature is always available on web (Wankel, 2011). It should be noted that the veracity of the contents that are posted on the social media outlets are not scrutinized. This may acts as one of the defining characteristics. This in turn also signifies a broad spectrum of mankind. It can be dull or insightful, biased or balanced, too revealing or guarded and most significantly outrageously libelous and verifiably true. False or accurate, anything can be posted on the websites or any other online sources with either a malicious intention or with the best intention. This makes it important for the readers or the users of these contents to scrutinize the validity and importance of the material that they read (Zarrella, 2010; Newson, Houghton & Patten, 2009; Al-Deen & He ndricks, 2012). Utilization of social media There are huge variations of websites and social media applications, which makes it impossible to list