CREATE SMART SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY

What is Social Media

What started out in 2003 as simple community based Web sites and tools for sharing information with friends, social media has grown into a phenomenon of epic proportions with the success of sites such as YouTube, Bebo, Flickr, Digg and a myriad of others. Earlier this month, ComScore reported that over half a billion people worldwide hang out on social networks. These social networkers translate into two-thirds of all Internet users. And half of those, about 250 million people, call Facebook and MySpace home — and the growth isn’t slowing!

By 2011, in the US, approximately 50% of all online adults and 84% of online teens will use social networks. And where there are people, there is an opportunity to creating a unique, long-lasting relationship between those people and your brand.

Marketers are doing more than experimenting with the medium, they are investing; with $1.6 billion expected to be spent in advertising in the US in 2008. Worldwide online social network ad spending is expected to grow by 75% to $2.1 billion by end of 2008, up from $1.2 billion. By 2011, worldwide spending is projected to be over $4 billion.

Engaging Social Networkers

The rapidly-growing, millions of social networkers, from teens to elderly adults, offer unparalleled opportunities to connect your brand to them.

Not only can you connect your brands with millions, but also you have unpre-cedented targeting ability. The content and the ads the social networkers encounter can now be targeted to niche groups of users defined by some or all of the following categories:

• Age
• Geographic Location
• Interests: Sports, music, movies, TV, books, etc.
• Gender
• Type of user: Heavy with 100’s of connections or Light with 10 connections

Buddy Media will create a smart social media strategy for your brand using our unique “Brand Advocate Process,” the only comprehensive approach to social advertising. Through this process, Buddy Media plans, develops, promotes and monitors “app-vertising” campaigns – branded social applications – that increase engagement and interaction between social networkers and brands.

Brand Advocate Process

Buddy Media’s social app-vertisements help brands significantly increase their brand awareness in a social world and deliver social brand loyalty.

Building Social Brand Loyalty

With Buddy Media, a brand’s social media strategy and creative execution will change for each campaign – but the end result will always be to significantly build, enhance and sustain what is best-termed “social brand loyalty.”

Social brand loyalty is best described as the intense adoption of, commitment to and interaction with a brand within a social network. For advertisers and brand marketers, achieving social brand loyalty is marked by their ability to:

• Generate initial use or introduction to a brand in a group setting
• Educate consumers to a brand’s features and benefits
• Create intense engagement with the brand
• Extend reach to a broader demographic target
• Drive rapid lift in awareness of the brand

By achieving social brand loyalty, a brand creates social brand advocates, eager evangelists of the brand and brand messages, who rapidly recommend the branded application and brand itself.

In addition, generating social brand loyalty is quantifiable, more efficient and highly effective – providing measurable and proven reasons for brand marketers and advertisers to market to social media audiences. And Buddy Media’s branded social applications have proven to be highly engaging–and the proof is in the numbers:

• An average engagement time of over 2 1/2 minutes per visit!
• On average, 84% of visitors to our applications are return users

Buddy Media delivers engaging social campaigns that successfully attract enthusiastic, loyal audiences.

Tracking Your Success

The days of unclear goals and parameters for measuring social media advertising are over. We now have a clear objective: create social brand loyalty of social networkers who become social brand advocates.

But how do you track and optimize social app-vertisement campaigns against guaranteed plan goals?

Answer: The Buddy Media BuddyBrain.

The BuddyBrain offers a user-friendly interface coupled with dependable, state-of-the-art analytic capabilities — resources you want, when you want them — everything from campaign project details and statistics to social media news and events.

Buddy Media’s BuddyBrain makes social app-vertising campaigns accessible, ac-countable, and results-driven.

• Does your online advertising strategy reach social networkers?
• Does your social media strategy engage social networkers?
• Is your social media strategy building social brand loyalty and creating social brand advocates?
• Are your social advertising campaigns accessible, accountable and results-driven?

If the answer to any of these questions was no, or even maybe, then you should contact us!