Businesses are increasingly utilizing social media networks for communication and advertising. Social networks can be utilized to reach far beyond the regular consumer scope.
It is a fair assumption that most consumers with web knowledge and e-mail accounts are currently active, or soon will be active, on some form of social networking site. Based on this assumption it makes much sense for businesses to integrate social media marketing in to their normal advertising scheme.
The majority of major vendors enable e-mail ad campaigns to be tracked even when the e-mail leaves to originally intended recipient.
Most recently though, social network groups are now replacing e-mail address books as the consumer's personal contact list. A growing number of consumers are more apt to post an e-mail to their blog or social network page as their preferred method of communication with friends and relatives.
There are two primary forms of contact within e-mail campaigns to social media:
Direct method
Contact is distributed directly to the business's own social media program, such as Facebook. This direct method extends the campaign to a greater number of prospected consumers.
Indirect method
Marketing with social sharing features built into the e-mail message allows recipients to share the information via the social networking site of their choosing.
Not every e-mail advertising campaign should be extended to social media networks as improper use can lead to wide spread consumer dissatisfaction. However, when using social networking as a form of marketing it is important to utilize both tracking and forwarding technologies to allow the reporting and sharing of information.
Merging social networking's with e-mail advertising campaigns can far extend the scope of audience and increase consumer impact. Improve effectiveness by enabling the viewer to share the e-mail through the personal media channel of their choice.
