Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social Media Marketing is the buzz of the hour and one can find innumerous material on it. Breaking the clutter is Dr. Sunil Gupta from HBS.  I watched a video lecture of Dr. Sunil Gupta who is a Professor of Business Administration and Head of the Marketing Department at Harvard Business School. He currently teaches an elective course on Digital Marketing Strategy. The lecture talked about effective social media marketing strategies which I would like to discuss. He has simplified it into five steps:

1.      Get to know the medium: One must understand the medium first and how it can be leveraged for the benefits of the organization. Like if we choose Linkedin for social media marketing then we will get more targeted segments while Facebook will give us a general online audience.

2.      New medium is not for everybody: One of the essential characteristics of Social media is that both negative and positive criticism will come out. So if you believe that the market has more vocal negative consumers and you will not be able to handle them then this medium is not for you.

3.      Objective: We must be very clear what we want to achieve through the campaign, creating a mere facebook page is not enough. We must have well defined goals and devise our strategy accordingly.

4.      Engagement/Relationship: The most important aspect of Social media is to get the consumers engaged and build long term relationships with them. Web 2.0 also talks about consumer generated content and it can be fruitful only if we treat our consumers as our partners.

5.      Return on investment: No campaign is complete without calculating return on investment. Especially in social media it is very important to define the correct metrics to measure the performance of the campaign.

 In my further posts I will be analyzing two different social media campaigns on these parameters one success and one failure.