Sometimes, when a client is speaking with us about social marketing, we get the question, “which one (network) should I use - facebook? twitter?”. And the answer of course is, “it depends”.
Which network you choose should depend entirely on who you are trying to reach and what you are trying to achieve. Don’t use twitter if you’re trying to reach seniors, and don’t use digg if you’re trying to promote SEO topics.
But once the appropriate networks have been identified, a more accurate answer to this same question might be “as many as you reasonably can manage”. The reason for this is that an effective marketing plan is always holistic in nature. This means that each part of the plan supports and strengthens the other parts of the plan.
TIME as an Element of Marketing Strategy
In a holistic marketing campaign, your video on YouTube is included in your website while a link is shared on your facebook account and a link goes out on Twitter. In a holistic marketing campaign, time is an element of a successfully implemented strategy.
You may not have the budget to plaster billboards, transit and TV with ads in a burst of brand exposure. But you can get your content in front of many eyes in one short-lived burst of coverage that can yeild results. For free, even.
Successful Holistic Marketing - An Example
A couple of weeks ago, the news couldn’t stop talking about the possible swine flu epidemic. News outlets, online social networks and even casual strangers were talking about it. And naturally, smart advertisers were listening.
The Content: a Screenshot of PPC Ads
I took this screenshot of some Google ads running on a newspaper website at the height of the epidemic coverage. I uploaded the image to flickr, and added a link to the flickr page in facebook and twitter. This whole process including creating the screenshot and sending out the links took about 5 minutes.
Within about a minute of publishing the link on facebook and twitter, I had over 20 views of the image. Within a day, there were hundreds of views. This happened because each view of the image or link helped to reinforce the other views. So if one person who saw the link to the image on facebook, they were more likely to click on the link when they saw it in twitter.
However, remember that these self-reinforcing “brand displays” are extremely short-lived on fast-moving social sites such as facebook and twitter. So there was an initial spike in traffic from the social networks which then died away as the link moved off people`s pages.
Therefore, what has driven the remainder of the 450 or so views of the image on flickr has been:
1. Ongoing interest in the image from people using the flickr search engine
2. Ongoing interest in the image from people who saw the image and have shared it
Therefore, if you can create that initial burst of coverage, you can kick-start your campaign and create the best chances of long-term success.
In summary - a campaign that involves multiple “parts” can, with prior planning and thought, leverage each “part” to create a reinforcing effect that can improve the performance of the overall campaign. If a camapign has been properly scoped out and prepared, you can increase the effectiveness of each particular social network or tool you are using to drive traffic.