Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing can be used as a powerful tool by marketers in order to reach their target audience in ways that were previously not possible. It is not only a way to reach your consumers but to also connect with them and get valuable feedback. Some of the basics involve a presence on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites and there are many businesses that do this today. But to extract the maximum benefits from this network, companies need to build upon this presence and set up some mechanisms to check the pulse of their market. For those that are new to the world of social media marketing, a good place to start is this book.

A trend that I can see developing is that with the plethora of social networking sites, there will be a need to consolidate this information in one place, for marketers. Similar to how a supermarket consolidates basic utilities for our convenience and how datamarts allow applications to consume data from a central repository - I see the emergence of something I call - "sociomarts". A sociomart would be a type of enterprise social supermarket, where marketers can extract information about a particular set of consumers, or a consumer, from one location. It would pull relevant information from the different social networking sites to compile one "profile" for your target audience. Through this, trends and meaningful information can be gleaned.