The Beginning:
The story of how Social Media Marketing came into being as a field is deeply intertwined with the story of online social media itself. With its foundational roots in the usernets and the bulletin boards of the pre 90s era, the earliest online social networks came into existence in the mid 90s. The first modern social media network, Six Degrees came into existence in 1997 heralded the beginning of social media becoming ubiquitous on the web. These early social networks were not adequately designed to facilitate the delivery of Social Media messages and thus had limited advertising potential.
The wave of Change:
The early 2000s brought some huge developments in social networking and social media. With social networks like Friendster, MySpace and Hi5 getting millions of active users, the need for effective social media optimization was felt by the online marketers. In 2004, a game changer in the field of social media emerged in the form of a “Harvard-only” social network that was later opened to the general public and became the single largest social network with over 500 million active users. Another advantage that Facebook brought for the online marketers was its design level integration of the Social Media Marketing capabilities. There were innumerable opportunities for branding, advertising and brand engagement that could be realized through SMM on these wide reaching social platforms, and the SMM industry began flourishing driven by these exciting prospects. These developments were further supplemented by an increase in the outreach of blogging websites like BlogSpot, Blogger etc. and social bookmarking, video sharing (e.g. YouTube) and photo sharing (e.g. Flickr) websites.
The Dynamic Paradigm:
Functionally, the present SMM techniques offer both social media features as well as promotional activities in Social Media. While the former deals with RSS feeds, social news and other user oriented tools, the latter focuses on blogging, blog commenting, discussion group participation, utilizing the regular social media networks like Facebook to create a promotional buzz.
The past few years have seen social media networks like Twitter coming up that allow their users to post microblogs in the form of pictures, text and videos which are then shared with their friends (or followers) on the network. This content sharing feature has allowed for an enhanced scope of social media optimization that can be undertaken on these microblogging networks with a much larger audience reach. Further, the dynamic nature of such content allows for greater interactivity with the audience, thus, enhancing its final outreach.
In its present form, Social Media Marketing (SMM) is not just limited to marketing and brand building. Small Businesses are now integrating their social media presence into their knowledge management networks leading to enhanced product/service development, recruiting, employee engagement and turnover, brand building, customer satisfaction and relations, business development etc. Additionally, Social Media Optimization is leveraged to create a community of the associated site, allowing for brand loyalty and a cordial business-customer relationship. However, an effective SMM strategy involves careful selection of appropriate media and marketing pitches so as to draw maximum returns from a SMM campaign, an area of expertise for the BSC SMM team.