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Can social media replace PPC?

Guest post by: Greg Pipe

Article Overview: What is the main influence towards social networking? Is it the opportunity to pry on competitors’ activities, a chance to advertise your own brand or simply the need and desire to have presence within a growing market? One thing is for sure, the social media world provides a use for anyone.

Can social media replace PPC?

What is the main influence towards social networking? Is it the opportunity to pry on competitors’ activities, a chance to advertise your own brand or simply the need and desire to have presence within a growing market? One thing is for sure, the social media world provides a use for anyone. With a large and varied audience for advertisers to target, companies are discovering an alterative method, or for some, a combined method, for pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.

PPC requires time and investment. Though social media demands time, it is free. A PPC campaign can take months to trigger and discover what works well towards budget and keywords. Social media provides flexibility and the opportunity to direct messages straight to your followers. However, that is not to say that a social strategy is not required, it definitely is.

The more appealing factor towards using social media this year is the prospect of social activity appearing in search engine results. This significantly opens up the opportunity for exposure to the world-wide-web.

Similar to PPC, a brand can target customers through keywords. Social sites such as Twitter and Youtube both allow a user to target people using #keywords. Facebook currently requires people to have some awareness of the brand in order to be effectively exposed.

Both PPC and social media use the same concept. Instigate initial interest through words or images that include a link to the brand website. Grab desired interest that will take the audience to an effective landing page and hopefully into a conversion.

The increase in popularity of social media means that more companies are discovering that their target audience is firstly online, but more importantly reachable.

Discover the impact of social media and implement a unique strategy for 2010

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Article Tags: PPC, social networking, Twitter, YouTube



Related Forum Posts
Re: Twitter, Social Networking: What's Your method? - The bottom line: You can have thousands of friends, and it takes only a second to add one, if you don't make conversation with them, it is a useless tool, like all social media sites. I know many people who concentrate mainly on social media marketing, and they make money, but it takes time. Personally, I rather skip social media and focus on other stuff, like article marketing, and I use social media only for fun and communicate with best friends.
Re: Real Estate via social networking? - Now day’s people love to busy on Social media websites especially on Facebook. They are also using internet for all other usual task of their life. They are getting all things on social media sites that's why social media transfer lot traffic to website.
Re: Social Media Marketing Ignorance - Has anyone read any good books on social media they'd like to share? I've been considering reading one, but wanted to see if anyone had any recommendations on an informative one. Someone earlier mentioned a lack of time. That is one reason I'm still in the dark ages as well but I realize that I may be falling behind the times by not at least considering the business case for social media against the time consumption. I'm also hesitant to use facebook and the like fearing it will turn into a platform for old friends to reconnect v. a way to grow my business. I also am unsure how much time it really takes to maintain various social media...any thoughts? Anyone made any mistakes or had any huge successes using social media for business that they'd like to share?
Re: How much is social media part of your marketing strategy? - Most of the companies make gross mistake by using techniques listed on the internet without even looking into whether they are suitable for their business or not. If you are dance company, music company etc etc then you simply cannot afford to ignore social media. There are several other businesses which perform well in social media promotion. You need to look whether social media will help your business or not. If you see huge pool of customers who are searching for your services on Youtube, metacafe, then surely you must jump for it.
Re: FILL IN THE BLANK: My favorite way to market my business is: - [quote="Evan":14pe90vp]Trent - agreed - people who come from SEO have the most willingness to take action and are the most likely to convert![/quote:14pe90vp] Yep, that's what I try telling other marketer's all the time, but too many of them are stuck in the social media clouds and not getting anywhere. I like social media to an extent but I'll take ONE visitor from Google via my SEO efforts over 10 visitors from [insert any social media site here] any day!


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