Social Media Marketing All-in-One For Dummies. Michelle Krasniak

Selecting shopping tools that work on social media

      

Monitoring the buzz

      In Book 1, you discover that the key to social media success is planning. This minibook reviews useful tools and resources to make your plan easier to execute. Before you start, you may also want to check out Book 9, which focuses on measurement tools for traffic, costs, and campaign performance.

      As you select tools and schedule tasks from suggestions in this chapter, remember to enter them on your Social Media Marketing Plan (Book 1, Chapter 3) and Social Media Activity Calendar (Book 1, Chapter 4). You can also download blank copies of these forms by clicking the Downloads tab at www.dummies.com/go/socialmediamarketingaio5e.

      Try to select at least one tool from each category:

       Resource, news, and blog sites that cover online marketing and social media

       Content-distribution tools

       URL-clipping tools

       Shopping apps or services for social media, if appropriate

       Buzz-tracking tools to monitor mentions of your business

You can always jump right into the social media scene and figure out these things later, but your efforts will be more productive if you build the right framework first.

Keeping Track of the Social Media Scene

      Unless you take advantage of online resources, you’ll never be able to stay current with the changes in social media. Here’s a quick look at how much the landscape changed in the course of just a few years:

       Use of social media continued its explosive growth. According to WeAreSocial.com (https://wearesocial.com/blog/2020/01/digital-2020-3-8-billion-people-use-social-media), nearly 4.54 billion people around the world are online, of which 3.80 billion are on social media. And as amazing as it might seem, Internet users in 2019 averaged more than 7.6 social media accounts each (www.brandwatch.com/blog/amazing-social-media-statistics-and-facts).

       Social media acquisitions run rampant. Facebook alone purchased Instagram for $1 billion in 2012; WhatsApp, a messaging app, for $19 billion in 2014; and Ascenta, a drone manufacturer, for another $20 million, also in 2014.

       During the 2020 COVID-19 crisis, social media usage grew by 61 percent and usage of messaging apps like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp grew by 50 percent. Twitter alone saw a 23 percent increase in daily users (https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanholmes/2020/04/24/is-covid-19-social-medias-levelling-up-moment).

       New social media platforms continue to pop up, proving that the power of innovation is still strong. Watch the growth of Meetup (social event planning), Viber (secure instant messaging app), and Vero (ad-free social network).

       At the same time, other social media services went belly-up. Casualties of the social media wars included Sulia (a subject-matter social media service that connected users to experts), Blab.im (which allowed narrow-casting of video to a defined set of followers), and most notably, Vine.co (the site noted for sharing short, looped videos, which has limited its recording functionality and become mainly a site to review old videos).

To keep current on the changing tides, subscribe to feeds about social marketing from social-marketing blogs or news services; check at least one source weekly. Also, review traffic trends on social media services weekly; they’re amazingly volatile. Table 1-1 lists some helpful resource sites.

TABLE 1-1 Social Media Marketing Resources

Name	URL	Description
HubSpot	http://blog.hubspot.com	Inbound marketing blog about attracting the right prospects to your site and converting them into customers
Marketing Land	http://marketingland.com	Internet marketing news
MarketingProfs	www.marketingprofs.com/marketing/library/100/social-media	Social media marketing tips, including business-to-business
MarketingSherpa	www.marketingsherpa.com	Publisher of free case studies, research, and training for marketers
SiteProNews	www.sitepronews.com	Social media and search engine news
Social Media Examiner	www.socialmediaexaminer.com	Online social media magazine advising businesses on the use of social media to achieve marketing goals
Social Media Marketing Group on LinkedIn	www.linkedin.com/groups/66325	Professional, non-promotional discussion group
Social Media Today	www.socialmediatoday.com	Online community for marketing and PR professionals dealing with social media
TechCrunch	http://techcrunch.com	Technology industry blog
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