Mediaboss Marketing

Social marketing develops buzz, creates loyalty, and engages customers. What's not to love? A winery with an upcoming wine-tasting, for example, might create a page about the event on its site and then link to it on social media sites, along with links to articles about the wines, recipes for foods that go well with the wines, and other related content.

Engaging the customer has always been fundamental to doing good business. It's just that now that engagement often starts in digital, social media realms.

The trick is to figure out how to make one's content as interesting as all the other content that shows up in the newsfeed, and this is where social media marketing companies come in.

Social Campaigns

As with other marketing, social media marketing works best when it's part of an overall campaign. This is the service provided by VerticalResponse and its recently acquired social media campaign platform, Roost.

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With Roost, business owners can create an integrated social media campaign complete with Facebook (Nasdaq: FB), Twitter, and LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) updates and tracking. It also offers a continuously updated library of content related to a business or product, so owners can post links to interesting articles for their social media friends and fans.

"We built Roost to help busy owners and operators be effective," Alex Chang, VerticalResponse's VP of social platforms, told the E-Commerce Times. "[They can take] 20 minutes on a Sunday night and start a great social media campaign."

Using Roost, a business can create a campaign of a variety of types of posts that go out to social media sites over time, and it can then measure how well those posts do in terms of engaging fans by tracking comments, shares, click-throughs and retweets.

It can also tie the social media campaign to an email campaign, with links to specially created Web pages and other content.

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Seamless, Smart, Successful Social Marketing