Social Media Marketing For Dummies®

Chapter 1. Understanding Social Influence Marketing

In This Chapter

• Understanding social media's role in social influence

• Knowing what types of influencers you're marketing to

• Coordinating your efforts with other types of marketing

• Moving beyond corporate marketing

When designing Web sites, you display banners and push your Web site listings higher up in the search engine rankings to promote and sell products. It's easy to forget how people actually buy. It's easy to assume that the potential customers are lonely people crouched over their computers late at night choosing what products to add to a shopping cart — isolated from the real world and their family and friends.

But in reality, that's not how people purchase online today. It might have been the case in the early days of the Web, when the people spending time online were the early adopters and the mavericks, the ones willing to take the risk of putting their credit card numbers into a computer hoping for accurate charges and secure transactions. In those days, few people bought online, and the ones who did were on the fringes of mainstream society.

Those days are over now. With nearly 260 million people using the Web on a regular basis in the United States alone, using the Internet has become a mainstream social activity. Consumers approach purchasing online differently, too, and as a result, you need to approach your marketing online differently as well. Your approach must incorporate influence marketing.

This chapter discusses ...