Welcome to the Digital Marketing Inner Circle

I am one of the SinoTech staff that works within the SMM team and I would like to share with you some of our teams experiences in undertaking Social Media Marketing. I work as part of this team and last month was responsible for a project where we had to build ‘buzz’ and promote a collection of cartoon characters within some social networks.

Here are some tips that helped me and you find some of these useful when next time you run a SMM (social media marketing) campaign.

1. Build a strong team

Like when you work on other campaigns, you need an excellent and strong team, no matter how many members there are, to support you and to work with you for the ultimate goal. Everyone needs to have a clear understanding of the goals and outcomes – know the role/responsibilities of each person in the team.

2. Choose the right platform

As the objectives and goals change, the platform you choose to help manage the campaign must be flexible and able to report the right metrics. In addition to a brand promotion, you need to identify where your target audience can be found so you can target these people. Therefore you need to be able to identify where your target audience spends time; SNS, BBS, Micro-blogging etc.

3. Providing useful information

People who use micro-blogging platforms like twitter and fanfou that the number of  followers you have is based (mostly) on the value of the information you provide, rather than your following number. So, rather than focusing on ‘followers’ and building ‘friends’ you should focus on content. I suggest you use a specific avatar/account for a specific area of information so you don’t have a very broad topic area.
Further, in my opinion, you do not need to be the first when providing useful information. It could be your personal experience, or some tips, useful links or even what did not work. Just keep the information to a specific theme and don’t spam.
I have previously written posts about the success (and sometimes not so sucsessful) campaigns. These can be found on some Chinese BBSs and SNS but what surprised me was how many readers commented that they found reading the positive and the negative experiences helped them and we even got some wanting to join our team.

4. Performance measurement

The purpose of measurement is to find the problem, and make adjustment ASAP. There are tools that can help you—I use SinoAnalytics to help me learn more about where the visitors come from and how they interact with our site and so on. The team needs the feedback so that they can learn the effects of what they’ve done, what more they can do in order to fulfill our goal, and where improvement is required.

5. Have Patients

In my last post, I mentioned SMM is about establishing connections, facilitating engagement and building relationships. This takes time.

I hope that some of these 5 tips provided some useful insights to those getting started with SMM. If you have any views on this, please comment below. Also you can take your ideas/views onto twitter: @farewellcup