2009 - The Year of Social Media Marketing

While the general media continue to focus on the doom and gloom of the economy, exciting things are happening online and online advertising continues to trend up. However, if companies continue to use the Internet just as a static place, they are unlikely to make their goals, achieve traffic growth and ultimately increase revenues. The Internet is now a dynamic and socially driven medium of communities. For example, video social networks is positioned to replace television as the dominant medium for influencing consumers, voters and the public in general; Twitter may well displace Blogs in 2009 as shown by the News media in the 08 elections. But don’t expect social media marketing to produce immediate results. Just as getting picked up by search engines takes about three months, expect social network marketing to take about six months to grow. You can expect about a 10% conversion rate so for every 10,000 people invited to your network, about 1000 will actually join. That’s a much higher conversion rate than the old days of direct mail and even email and, at a fraction of the cost. Dell computers says Twitter has helped it bring in $1 million in revenue over the past 18 months via sales Tweets and other promotions. Can you afford to ignore social media marketing in 2009? Post your comments or email me at businessissuestoday.com for a private consultation.