Social Media Marketing
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Social media started as a gamey kind of thing, but has now become a game-changer, with brands and products embracing it to hard-sell, by word of click. It makes sense for such companies to monitor social media and gauge the results. However, measuring social media is not like regular analytics stuff, which is where many go wrong. Addpro Network shows you how to get it right:

Measuring social media : Statistics does not the whole story tell. The referrals from social media may compare unfavorably with an SEM campaign, but that is not because you don’t make a sale at the end of the day. It is just that in social media, the action is elsewhere and may not necessarily reflect on your site referral stats all the time.

Look out for intangible signals. For example, a “feel good factor” for a brand which can be perceived if you ask someone about it, though it might not show up in the referral stats. Social media is more about perception, engagement, emotions, and less about numbers, which is why some prefer the phrase “monitoring social media” to “measuring social media”.

Addpro Network will leverage a host of social media monitoring tools to market your product/service/website and which reveal to what extent social media is useful in spreading the butter thick, and in informally providing a touch and feel of the product or the brand we are pushing through it to a larger audience.

For the Internet evangelists of Web 2.0, social media are like tenants in the World Wide Web who open the doors to a world of advantages viz. finding the right customer for the right product, a curiously dispassionate, yet personalized system of referral, and an authentic step toward a 360-degree appraisal by way of dialogue between the site owner and the viewer, between the prospect and the product user.

Evolution of Social Media
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At first, Social networking websites like Facebook, MySpace and Orkut were inspired from a need to connect with people – unknown first, and then known. A flat world shrunk the earth into a global village, but it also created new ways of connecting with people – known and unknown, strangers and accomplices, family and friends, colleagues and comrades.

And all this, let it be remembered, is virtually on the house, as cheap as it could get. Connectivity today does not come with a pricey tag, and the eagle-eyed among the site owners and site publishers have been quick to seize upon this and harness it.

When people connect, when they relate and respond, the world is interested! Everyone wants to know what you, me and the rest of us think, feel, like, hate, enjoy, detest, use, abuse, want, dislike and of late, what makes us work better, what we look forward to and why, and so on and so forth.

All this has led to an avalanche of news, views and juice. The stage is set for people on the prowl – for selling and buying products, services, and personnel.

Web 1.0 laid the roadmap. Web 2.0 is connecting the dots for the future.

The Need for Social Media Marketing
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Now, there are some people – even now – who might be tempted to ask: Do we really need Social Media? The answer is: Who doesn’t? In a global market that has no boundaries, and where consumers could be anyone from Texas to Timbuktoo, you need to ‘shout’ your product, again, and some more again. It applies even to the big boys too. Suppose Coke stops its marketing campaign for a week. Do you think its sales would not dip? Suppose again Coke doubles its p.r. for the same period. Would its sales not rise?

Now, how do you make your product or service reach your customers from Timbuktoo to Texas? No one is asking this question today anymore. It shows how relevant, critical, and mandatory social media has become as a cutting edge marketing tool. If you have anything to market at all, you cannot do without social media – even if you are an elephant in the room!