Social Marketing - community building | Weboptim

We have entered a new era of marketing! One-way communication has been replaced by dialogue.

In traditional marketing, the marketer has done the talking, the consumer has listened in good cases and avoided the advertising in bad cases. Think of the ad blocking devices!

The new (social) marketing is based on mutual communication. Ask, listen and respond to our customers' needs. This is what social marketing is good for, and we can see many examples of it nowadays, e.g. Youtube, FaceBook, MYspace, etc...
On YouTube, for example, there are videos that can be viewed by millions of people in a day.

What opportunities are there to build community?

Blogs
Forums
Chat pages
Social networking sites (including your own)

The benefits of communities:

Anyone can join and have their say
Information spreads fast
Cheaper than TV, Radio and Press
There's no idle chatter, read for those who care
Provides immediate feedback
The consumer can choose
No need to block advertising
A bottom-up strategy
Search the information gathered

Steps to community building:

1. Find the websites where your target audience visits
2. Who are they? Let's group them
3. Select those who write a lot and form opinions
4. Talk to them, make contact
5. Use viral marketing
6. Create engaging content that will keep them coming back.
7. Hold polls, collect opinions
8. Respond quickly to negative criticism
9. Analyse often!
10. Create your own open or closed community.

To achieve this goal, it is important to become a professional search engine user. And we don't just mean Google.

Create your own community:

Defining the target audience
Developing a strategy
What content do you need?
Analysis of customers
Competitor analysis
Recruitment
Communicate with them