Social media marketing is a product and typical representative of the Web 2.0 era, with the following characteristics.
(1) User-generated content. This is the main reason for the explosion of online information in the Web 2.0 era, and it has also led to the transfer of online discourse power to the user side. Therefore, a key task of social media marketing is to stimulate user-generated content, but marketers should provide directional guidance to prevent the spread of negative content.
(2) Rich content, diverse forms, and high creativity requirements. Social media marketing can carry rich content, and various media forms support various ideas. Social media often gathers popularity due to interests. Marketing activities cannot interfere with normal social interaction. Usually, the content is required to be useful and interesting, so the comprehensive quality requirements for marketers are also high.
(3) Strong interactivity. Social media marketing often pursues exponential fission. The core conditions for fission are content and interaction. Excellent fission incentives are catalysts that can enhance interaction. Keeping the community/group active is an important task for marketers. At the same time, it is precisely because social media supports strong interaction that cross-border e-commerce merchants often provide services to members through social media, and the effect is better than other marketing forms.
Especially, the concept of “traffic pool” is widely accepted, and the key position of social media in the entire Internet marketing has been established. Social media marketing also has many other characteristics, such as continuous marketing, free switching of marketing themes, and outstanding application advantages in brand marketing. There are also some disadvantages, such as too many channels and fast upgrades and innovations, high requirements for the comprehensive quality of the marketing team, difficult to evaluate the effect, and even possible negative effects, which often make it difficult for business owners to make up their minds to start social media marketing…
Social media marketing can be divided into free and paid types. According to the nature of social media, it can be divided into blog marketing, community marketing, forum marketing, social website marketing, virtual world marketing and cooperative project marketing, etc. According to the type of media, it can be divided into text marketing, graphic marketing, picture marketing, video marketing and interactive marketing, etc. Through the classification of different standards, we can help us deeply understand the characteristics of social media marketing from every aspect.
The basic paradigm of social media marketing: social media marketing = audience x content x channel
From this paradigm, we can see that the factors affecting the effectiveness of social media marketing are audience (accuracy), content (quality) and channel (efficiency).