A person challenged if we have to identify a marketer who hasn't used popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Ning to stretch its advertising dollars. Whether they are broadcasting 140-character updates on Twitter, posting photos from recent company events for their Facebook walls, or answering and adjusting customer opinions on Ning, companies across all industries are realizing the value of this broad-reaching, as well as affordable, channel.
Based on general market trends firm eMarketer, in myspace and facebook advertising, all roads cause Facebook. eMarketer forecasts that it's going to have $4 billion in ad revenues worldwide this year. Twitter is anticipated to get $150 million in spending. Overall, worldwide myspace and facebook expenses are most likely to reach almost $6 billion this holiday season. This is a big chunk of change for just a medium that simply A decade ago didn't even exist.
DRTV and social media play particularly well together as a result of direct nature of both. Through short-form commercials and infomercials, DRTV speaks straight away to consumers and urges those to do something. Using even shorter, more concise methods, social networkers are taking the same approach by engaging past, current and potential clients online.
On many occasions, social networking serves as a viable and cheap adjunct to DRTV campaigns, that contain historically been supported by retail- and web-based extensions of themselves. Throw sites like Facebook to the mix, and DRTV's value proposition becomes much stronger. Create short, videos from existing infomercials and short-form spots and link them into your social networking messages and updates, and stretch your original investment even further.
And although online community to be a marketing convention remains nascent, and also has not discovered completely, this process behind it is quite simple: you add stuff for the sites, share it using your "friends" or "followers," who then become viral marketers in your firm by sharing the nice stuff using their own networks via tweets, walls and various methods. Not counting the time it takes to update and upload the data, there's not much left for the marketer to try and do (or, put money into).
Then the real fun begins, for unlike traditional TV, magazine, radio or newspaper advertising, social networks are a two-way street. It engages customers in tangible conversation. It also expands your horizons for personalizing important business components like support services; helps you conduct focus groups inside an affordable, fast manner; and seamlessly links into your growing mobile marketing movement.
Like anything, integrating social media to a DRTV campaign takes some work. It's not enough only to produce a Twitter or Facebook account and relax whilst the sales pour in. For social media to function, you need to persuade fellow networkers to follow along with and locate you; connect with your site/profile; view your details, photos and videos; talk with you; and share everything utilizing their own networks.
Getting there takes engaging content - an element that most direct marketers already are built with. It also takes some creativity, plus a willingness that will put time into "getting social" online using a regular (usually daily, and in many cases hourly) basis. On Twitter, creating sales-oriented tweets requires extraordinary creativity, since the space is restricted to 140 characters and multiple entries on a single subject are unwelcome.
While you develop and hone your company's social network strategy, and integrate it with all your DRTV inside of a meaningful way, remember that your goals will be to solicit feedback from customers and actions. Borrow a page from the likes of PepsiCo, Starbucks and Kraft, which have intertwined social internet marketing in their advertising portfolios. By developing their content engaging, intriguing, notable and worth sharing, these lenders have grown to be pros at getting their clients for being active and engaged product advocates in their online social media world.
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