Social media marketing is definitely one of the most significant new trends in Web based retail promotion. Undoubtedly, it is productive and highly effective in building long-term customer relationships. It gives a better return on investment (RoI) than most other traditional marketing techniques. However, often, online merchants fail to realize its true essence.

Many of the small businesses are already engaged in a ubiquitous mode of social marketing through email. But they need to move a notch higher in their quest to build bridges with potential customers. This is where social marketing comes into play. This online word-of-mouth marketing tries to engage business stakeholders, partners, clients and potential customers.

Following are some of the critical aspects related to it:

• The idea behind social marketing is to forge genuine and authentic relationships that may or may not always be aimed at the actual sale or direct promotion of a brand.
• Selling a product or canvassing a service should not be the sole motive. The broader aim should be to convince potential customers about the credibility of a brand.
• The social marketing relationships’ spectrum on the Internet is often focused on the exchange of a spontaneous exchange of information useful information that is of value to both the marketer and the target audience.

A spontaneous exchange of information

What drives your social marketing initiative is a spontaneous exchange of information on popular networking platforms, such as Facebook, Digg, Tangle, YouTube, or Twitter, to name a few.  It works the same way people turn friends in order to gain mutually from the interaction. Other forms of social media involve regular blogs and the email communications.

It has been proved that email marketing can be a very powerful tool of social marketing. Importantly, it makes possible to directly establish rapport with customers and prospects. You can address them personally. The content can well be customized to match known interests. Also, the frequency of interactions can be controlled.

Of course, email as a form of social marketing alone won’t necessarily suffice. It must be combined with the various other social marketing tools to improve its effectiveness.

Building holistic and full-fledged customer relationships

Social marketing should be so integrated into your business plan that you are able to secure a holistic and full-fledged customer relationship and gratification cycle. It involves information dissemination, conversion and customer service. Till the point a customer is encouraged to purchase a product/service, there are many crucial steps, including:

1. Building and sustaining your target audience
2. Engaging them with domain-specific and dynamic content
3. Generating blog posts or email newsletters or programmatically creating tweets and messages on other networking sites like Facebook.

Businesses can encourage users to register for newsletters from social media sites. As newsletter recipients or your followers forward the information, the virtuous cycle create more and more registrations (relationships) at a faster clip thanks to social media’s reach and popularity. This enables marketers to locate new prospect and engage them on a sustained basis.