Page 164 - Social Media Marketing

Tapping the Power of Social Media Marketing 149

Every type of social media provides you with an opportunity
to present yourself and your products and services to dynamic
communities and individuals who may be interested in them. The
challenge is to present what you have to offer in a way that appeals
to the community. This usually means that you need to take a soft-
sell approach, if you choose to advertise or sell at all.

Grasping the Pros and Cons of Social Media Marketing

Both the pros and cons of social media marketing derive from the
same source: the fact that people are going to talk about you. If they
are saying good things about you and your products and services,
that's a benefit; however, the potential drawback is that people are
going to criticize you.

You can clearly see the effect of social media marketing by visiting
Amazon.com and looking up a few books. Amazon encourages its
customers to post reviews ofbooks and other items sold on Amazon.
According to Amazon, books that have plenty of positive reviews
generally sell about 10 percent better than books that do not have
any reviews. People buy the book, read it, and post a positive review,
which convinces more people to buy the book, read it, and post
positive reviews. Soon, the book and its readership gain so much
momentum that you no longer have to sell the book-it sells itself
or, more accurately, the community of book readers that formed
around the book sell it for you.

On the other hand, one or two negative reviews can sink the sales
of a book. Nobody's buying it, reading it, or talking about it, so sales
of the book never take off.

You can witness the same phenomenon with other social media
web sites where consumers share their opinions about products and
services. For example, people can go on the web site TripAdvisor
(www.tripadvisor.com) and post reviews and ratings for restau-
rants, hotels and motels, nightclubs, and attractions. If you own
a hotel that's getting the thumbs-down from dozens of customers
who stayed there, business could quickly taper off. If you happen