Marketing is about telling stories and telling interesting stories that people want to hear. If you know how to tell stories and do it effectively on Facebook and online, people will bond with you and your story, which translates to branding, long-term affinity, and engagement. This will then translate to dollars and cents. People look for relationships, and relationships are stories.
The biggest buzzword right now in terms of online marketing is Social Media Marketing. Social Media means, a platform that is social, with a lot of people, and because of the crowd of people, it becomes a means of advertising, marketing, branding and public relations.
Social networks are divided into 4 categories:
1. Wikis: Collaboration platforms that allow team-based project management spread across different geographic team members.
2. Forums: platforms for the communication of opinions and threads in the form of fan pages or Facebook groups or even websites.
3. Blogs: Corporate blogs that deal with a company and vain blogs that deal with personal life. Blogging platforms allow commenting and interacting with the reading audience.
4. Social networks: Like Facebook and even YouTube and Twitter, which allow people to share photos, status updates and videos.
Like its namesake, Social means people and people means stories.
To market successfully on social media, marketers must learn to focus on storytelling. Using those stories and pairing them with meaning, marketers can build awareness, stickiness, and affinity, which will then translate into long-term following and ultimately sales and profits.
Remember, everyone is telling a story, and being able to tell the right story to empathize with is the crucial new skill for marketing today, especially on social media platforms.